Seamark, page 6
The choking sounds made Auban turn, and luckily for Morgan, his hips were below the water because Morgan wasn’t prepared to be confronted with that much glorious nudity right then. He’d seen Auban naked before, of course—changed his seaweed bandages, cleaned his wounds with seawater—but it hadn’t been like this.
In the darkness, it was hard to see the scars left by the fire. All Morgan could see was his friend’s pleasure in being able to stand, to move, and how the smile on his face made him look even more beautiful.
“Morgan!” Auban called out softly. “You’re earlier than you usually are.”
“I …” Morgan coughed to clear his throat. “I didn’t want to make you wait any longer.”
“I appreciate that,” Auban replied. “I missed you.”
Morgan’s heart briefly stopped. “I … I missed you as well.” More than I knew even though so many other things were going on.
“Come tell me what you’ve been doing.”
“Come … what, into the water?” Morgan eyed him dubiously as he walked over. “Should you be in there? Are you strong enough for this?”
“It’s easier to stand with the sea’s help,” Auban assured him. “And now I’ve got you to catch me if I start to drift away.”
I would love to catch you. “All right.” Morgan took off his kilt and set down the package of food he’d brought, then stepped into the water, resolutely not letting himself think any sexual thoughts—at least until he was covered up again. “My brother and I have been hard at work on a boat for you,” he said. “It’s going … I’m not entirely sure how it’s going, honestly, but I think we’ll be lucky to make you something that floats in the end.”
“I appreciate your efforts even if it doesn’t,” Auban said.
“You won’t appreciate it if you end up capsized in the middle of the ocean,” Morgan said glumly, splashing a little water with his hands.
“I wish I didn’t have to use it.”
Morgan looked up abruptly, his heart pounding. “You do?”
“I do.” Auban looked from him out to the east, where the sun was just appearing over the edge of the sea. He wasn’t shivering, which surprised Morgan—even for an Agnarra like himself, in his land form the water was cold right now. Winter, and the storms that came with it, was slowly turning back toward their island. “It’s peaceful here,” Auban continued, something conflicted in his voice. “I can’t seem to remember my old life, no matter how hard I try, but I get the sense that there wasn’t much peace in it.”
“Well, you did come here on a warship,” Morgan said, then wished he hadn’t.
“I know,” Auban replied quietly. “I just wish I knew why. Did we come here to hunt you? To kill you?” He shook his head. “Why would we do such a thing? What is the point? It’s senseless—look at this island. It’s just large enough for you and your clan. What could anyone else hope to get here?”
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “I’ve never understood humans.”
“I don’t either,” Auban said, then laughed caustically. “And I am one! You’d think I’d understand my own motives better, but I don’t. I just don’t.” He shivered, and Morgan knew it was time to get him warm again.
“I brought you a berrybread hotcake. It won’t be hot anymore, but it will be delicious. We can talk some more, and I can look at your wounds.”
“They’re nearly healed,” Auban protested, but he didn’t resist as Morgan took his hand and gently pulled him up out of the water. “I just need to build up my strength. Soon, too. I know I can’t stay here during the winter months.”
No, he wouldn’t be able to. The beach was too exposed; he would freeze if he stayed, but there was no way Morgan could bring him into the village. They had perhaps a month, maybe a week or two more than that, and then …
Auban needed to be off the island, or he’d be discovered for sure.
“We’ll figure it out,” Morgan promised him. “Everything will be all right.”
That was when he saw a dark shadow peel away from a low point on the beach and begin to dart away.
Oh no.
Oh shit.
Nothing was going to be all right. Not unless he stopped whoever that was from making it back to the village!
Morgan ran.
Chapter eleven
No one was more surprised than Morgan himself when he closed the distance and tackled the other person before they even made it off the beach. He readied himself to fight, or threaten, or do whatever he needed to do—well, almost whatever—to get them to never speak of this, but then he realized exactly who he’d tackled.
“Garen!” Morgan sat back and let his friend up, delighted—
And promptly fell on his ass as Garen punched him in the face.
Ow. OW! That hurt! And, shit, Garen was starting to get up and turn again; Morgan couldn’t let him get away. He grabbed his legs and forced him down again, this time sitting on his back. Garen was the better fighter, but Morgan was scrappy as hell and had a wicked grip on Garen’s hair.
“Stop!” he snapped. “What the deep are you doing?”
“Me?” Garen sounded incredibly offended. “You’re the one having strange liaisons in the sea with people I don’t even know! What the deep are you doing out here, huh?”
“I’m—it’s not—there’s no liaising, I’m not liaising with anyone!”
“Then who were you talking to out there?”
“No one,” Morgan said a bit frantically. “There’s no one here but you and me.”
“Morgan!” There was real, deep hurt in Garen’s voice now. Second-guessing himself but knowing he had to trust in their friendship, Morgan let go of Garen’s hair. The other man rolled over beneath him, not even trying to buck Morgan off but seemingly desperate to make eye contact. “I spend every minute with my father, pretending to see the same things he does to keep him from falling into a screaming fit,” Garen hissed in anger and despair. “Reality doesn’t have a place in my own home, so don’t you start telling me I’m not seeing things that I clearly am, or I might have a screaming fit myself!”
“Oh.” Oh, my poor friend. “Come here.” Morgan pulled Garen into an embrace before his friend could do more than squawk about it. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re up to something,” Garen muttered, but the ire was slowly draining out of his voice and body.
“I …” Honesty, Morgan. He needs honesty. “Yes, fine, I am. And I’ll tell you all about it, but! I need you to promise me that you’ll listen to the whole story before you run off and start gabbing to people about it! This is really important, Garen. It’s a matter of life and death.” Morgan stared at his friend, willing him to take him seriously for once.
“You want to bring me in on a matter of life and death?” Garen glanced over Morgan’s shoulder. “Are you … sure?”
“You’re the only one I could imagine telling, honestly.”
Garen lowered his voice to a whisper. “Is it another one of us? Another survivor?”
Oh, this was going to be so awful. “It is a survivor. Let me—”
“I’m human.”
Both of them turned in a flash to look at Auban, who had somehow dragged himself all the way up to this part of the beach, far from the supportive water. Right now, slumped against the gravel, naked and shivering, with the light of dawn slowly illuminating the damage his body had taken, he looked far less intimidating than anyone calling themselves a human should.
Which, Morgan realized, was the whole point. “Humans” were scary, but this battered, skinny wreck of a person wasn’t.
“Morgan found me in the water after the ship exploded,” Auban went on, and now it was Garen’s turn to shiver. He turned a betrayed look on Morgan, and all Morgan could do was shrug.
“I don’t remember what happened there, or what we were doing here,” Auban said. “I don’t remember anything except waking up and Morgan’s face being the first thing I saw. Without his care, I would be dead.”
“You should be dead!” Garen snapped. “You ought to be dead for the havoc you wrought on our home! Humans have no place on our island, our sanctuary! You should have died with the rest of your awful kind!”
“I know.” Auban lowered his head. “I completely understand, I assure you. But the fact is, I’m alive. Unless you want to kill me yourself, the best thing to do is get me off this island as fast as possible, and that’s what Morgan is trying to do.”
“The boat,” Garen muttered, then sighed in despair. “The fucking boat you’re building with Brevaer. It’s for him?”
“How else am I supposed to save him?” Morgan demanded.
“You’re not supposed to save him at all! You’re supposed to be on our side, not his!”
“I am on our side!” Morgan roared. That got Garen, really got him—his eyes widened, mouth dropping open. Morgan had never yelled at his friend like that before in his life. He hated that he had to do it now, but he also needed to make Garen understand.
“I’m on our side, always,” Morgan said more quietly. “But Auban isn’t our enemy. He’s a good person.”
“You don’t know that,” Garen argued.
“I do! He’s kind and sweet and he treats me with dignity!”
Garen pointed a finger at Morgan as though he were about to catch a huge fish. “But you didn’t know any of that when you first pulled him out of the water.”
“No, I didn’t,” Morgan said, not at all repentant. “He was hurt, I helped him, and I’m not sorry about it. I was prepared to kill him if I needed to,” he added, which was a lie, but no one needed to know that. “But I didn’t. I want to help him. I want to give him a chance to get back to his own home.”
“You’re mad,” Garen said, but there was an undercurrent of resignation in his voice that let Morgan know he was making progress. “You’re completely mad. Your brain has been baked by the sun. Do you know what would happen to you if anyone finds out you’re harboring a human?”
“It would be bad.”
“Your brother would beat you half to death, the elders would beat you the rest of the way, and Brevaer would never be voted in as chief.”
“I know!” Morgan had gone over the ramifications in his head time and time again; he knew the consequences that would fall on him and his family if word of this got out. “Why do you think I ran so fast to catch you? I thought you were Drenikel!”
“And what would you have done if I was Drenikel, bashed me over the head with a rock and fed me to your human friend?”
Morgan had no good answer for that. Fortunately, Auban chose that moment to faint, providing an excellent distraction for both of them. Morgan clambered off Garen and ran over to Auban, who seemed unusually pale even for him. “He’s exhausted,” he muttered, then looped one of Auban’s arms over his shoulders. “Help me get him back to his bed.”
Garen looked at him like he’d just asked him to wipe the human’s dirty ass.
“Garen, come on! We have to do this fast; do you want someone to find us in the middle of the beach carrying Auban between us?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d never met you,” Garen huffed, but he got up and gingerly got his shoulders under Auban’s other arm. Together, they moved Auban back down to the overhang and settled him onto his seaweed bed. He woke up just as Morgan was adjusting his feet.
“Fuck,” he said groggily.
Morgan didn’t mean to, but he began to laugh. He’d never heard Auban speak like that before, crudely, like one of the men in the village. He’d been gentle, refined … and now it was like he’d swallowed a mouthful of seawater, he was so salty.
“Sorry,” Auban apologized, but he was half smiling. “I think I overdid it. Damn legs …” He glared down at the appendages in question, which had by far taken the most damage. Several of his toes were fused, and the front of his right leg was still vividly red, the skin taking a long time to regenerate there. “Let’s hope my arms get stronger faster. I assume I’ll have to use an oar with this boat?”
Right, back to the subject at hand. “Yes,” Morgan said. He knew humans had ways of capturing the wind to help propel them, but Morgan had no clue how to do that. “I’ll have to wrangle the materials for it somehow, but—”
“I can do that,” Garen put in. He looked sour, but his voice was firm enough. “I’ve got something we can use,” he said, this time looking straight at Morgan. “It’s one of my father’s old training spears,” he said. “No one will notice it’s missing.”
“Thank you,” Morgan said, touched beyond telling.
“Thank you,” Auban echoed. “I can see you’re a good friend to Morgan.”
“The best,” Garen said snippily. “Which is the only reason you’re alive right now. If you care about Morgan at all, as soon as you can leave … go.”
“I will,” Auban said solemnly, his eyes darting to Morgan’s before he turned to look out at the sea. “I know I have no place here. I promise, as soon as I’m capable, I’ll go.”
“Good.” Garen sounded satisfied by that.
Morgan was far from it, but he knew he couldn’t argue. He was destined to lose Auban. The thought of keeping him should never even have crossed his mind, and yet the idea filled him with a kind of poignant longing anyhow.
Still, they’d pushed their luck far enough. The sooner Auban was off the island, the safer he would be.
Morgan would have to learn to be satisfied with that.
Chapter twelve
In truth, it was the perfect time for Morgan and Auban to be discovered—at least by a friend. The entire village was wrapped up in catching, preserving, and cooking sturgeon, which Morgan had to admit were delicious, from the crisp crunch of their scaly backs to the glistening, dark wonder of their eggs. And everyone who wasn’t working on the sturgeon was working in the fields, including Morgan and Garen, but only in the mornings. In the afternoons, they had plenty of free time, and Morgan decided it would be a good idea to move the boat to the pebble beach.
“I can say I was sick of it being in the way if Brevaer asks,” he said one afternoon a week after Garen’s discovery. His friend was still prickly about the entire thing, but a few more meetings with Auban had convinced him that the human was at least in earnest about wanting to leave as much as Morgan wished he wouldn’t. “And that you and I are finishing it up on our own.”
“You don’t think that will upset him?” Galen asked, wrapping his hands with leaves to help keep the edges of the boat from biting into his skin. “After all the work you two did on it together, to take it over by yourself and cut him out?”
“Brevaer never gets upset about that sort of thing,” Morgan said blithely. “He’s too busy being better than everyone at everything else.”
“I think you don’t see things very clearly where you and your brother are concerned,” Garen replied. “He loves you very much. He’s just not very good at showing it.”
Morgan opened his mouth to argue, then reconsidered. After all, when it came to complicated relationships with people who weren’t very good at showing their affection, Garen was the authority.
When backed into a corner, tease your way out of it. “Are you sure you’re not talking about his relationship with you?” Morgan asked, wrapping his own hands up. One layer ought to be enough … He stared down at the heavy boat and frowned. Hmm, maybe two layers would be better. “Aren’t you the one he’s spending all that extra time training with in the mornings before he goes out to sea?”
“It’s because my mother asked it of him,” Garen said, but there was no mistaking the flush in his cheeks. “It’s just that she’s concerned about my ability to protect myself.”
“She ought to be concerned about idiots like Drenikel, not worried about people like you who actually practice every single day.” Dren and his crew were becoming more insufferable by the day; it was only due to the fact that everybody was needed to help prepare food for winter that they weren’t dogging Morgan’s every step. As it was, they spent most days drowning in fish guts instead, which was quite pleasant. “All right, let’s try to move it.”
“All right.” They reached down, got their grips, and hoisted the boat up.
Morgan almost immediately let go of it, sending Garen crashing down to his knees with a cut-off cry. “Damn, that’s heavy!”
“Ow,” Garen snapped, rubbing his lower back. “Warn me before you drop it, Morgan!”
“I didn’t know I was going to drop it!”
“I still could have used a warning!”
This wasn’t an argument worth having, especially not with the truth staring Morgan so starkly in the face. “We won’t be able to carry it to the beach.”
“No kidding,” Garen muttered as he got back to his feet. “Not if you’re going to drop it every two feet.”
“You wouldn’t have been able to hold it up much longer either! Now shut up and let me think.” Think, think … we’ll have to float it there. It was the only way. But that meant possibly exposing their movement to the sight of the village, which didn’t bode well for keeping things under wraps. But if they waited until evening, when the central beach was empty, Brevaer would be back, and he would undoubtedly have questions that Morgan didn’t want to answer about where the boat was going.
“We’ll have to chance it in the water,” he said at last. “Maybe we could push it from below?”
“Towing it would be better,” Garen said. “I think I can get a rope around the front, actually … but you’ll need to sit inside it and stabilize it with the paddle.” The paddle was still mostly stick shaped.
“Sure,” Morgan said with all the conviction of someone who had no idea what he was doing but didn’t want to let on. “I can do that.” First, though, they had to get the damn thing down to the shore.
In the end, they rolled it. The log was heavy and hardy enough that it bumped over rocks and roots with aplomb, and by the time they got it to the water, Morgan was cautiously optimistic that even the worst storm wouldn’t be able to tear it apart. Getting inside of it and balancing it, however …
