“Easy, pal,” I said, giving him a pat on the back. “Take it slow. We got you.”
He had the brightest green eyes I’d ever seen, and believe me, I’ve seen plenty. They blinked at me once, twice, and then he started coughing. I held him forward a little so he could spit up the rest of what was in his lungs on the deck. Look, coming back from almost drowning is hardly a dignified process. He was doing his best.
Luke passed me a canteen of fresh water, which I put to our visitor’s lips. He drank gratefully — a little too gratefully, in fact, which meant I had to pull it back. He made the cutest little sound of disappointment, but to no avail. I’m fairly well-practiced at saying no. “Take it slow,” I told him again, never taking my hands off him. “We just got plenty of water out of you. Let’s take our time putting it back in, hm?”
He had a sweet face, as chubby and pink as the rest of him, freckled from exposure to the sun. There’d been a strange little fog that had rolled in earlier, one of those curious little nautical things that just seem to happen from time to time, but it was gone now and the sky and sea alike couldn’t be clearer or calmer. The sun blazed high in the center of it, turning the surface of the water so bright you could hardly look at it. They made the word empyrean to talk about the sky on a day like this, did you know that? English-speakers use it to mean heavenly, which is fair, language being what it is and all, but in my home tongue it literally means on fire.
“Where … what happened?” he managed. The words rasped a little out of his throat, parched from the salt water he’d swallowed. A little disorientation was normal in situations like this. He seemed like a sharp kid. He’d adapt.
I gave him another little drink from the canteen. This time he let me control the pace and didn’t object when I decided he was done. Good boy; he was learning. “Why don’t you start by telling me what you remember?” We could piece it together, together.
