She felt her cheeks burning at the thought of where his hands had been, and the fact that unconsciously, she would have liked the moment to linger.
Then, in one single easy motion, he was in after her with one boot on the rail, one hand to the mast, and his body settling intothe kind of balance that suggested he belonged more naturally to moving decks than to dry land.
She realized she was still clutching the rail with both hands and loosened her grip slowly, one finger at a time.
"Ye can hold it," he muttered, without looking at her. "Nay shame in it."
"I'm nae holding it." She attempted to sound indignant.
"Aye." A pause. "Ye're nae holding it very tightly at all."
He was watching the water ahead, and the corner of his mouth was doing the thing again.
"Ye're insufferable on land," she said. "Are ye worse on the water?"
"Considerably," he smirked, before nodding to Torvald, who yelled an order.
The men shoved off, and the birlinn scraped over the stones with a rough, grating sound before the oars bit the water together. The change was immediate and deeply unpleasant. The shore, which had a moment before existed under her feet with all the steadiness of the known world, began to slip away.
The beach pulled back first, then the path leading up from it, then the dark lines of the castle and the hills beyond. Nothing dramatic happened, yet the feeling of leaving still landed with terrible force. The land simply receded, as if it had agreed too easily to let her go.
She kept her eyes on it until the details blurred into shape and distance. Then she forced herself to turn toward Mull.
The island lay ahead, dark against the water, growing by such small degrees that it scarcely seemed to move at all. Behind her, everything she had known was shrinking. Ahead was a place she had never seen, and a life she had not chosen. She fixed her eyes on the island.
This is only water. Water is merely the space between one shore and another. People cross seas every day without dying of fear or humiliation.
She told herself the words very firmly, but then the birlinn shifted beneath her feet.
She discovered almost at once that reason had very little power over motion. The heave of the boat came up through her boots and settled low in her stomach with a patient, horrible consistency. The horizon tilted, righted itself, and tilted again. She took a breath and then another, gripped the rail she was definitely not gripping, and kept her face composed out of sheer defiance.
The wind came at her hard off the water, sharp enough to sting her eyes.
Then, almost without her noticing how, it lessened.
Ivar had stepped in behind her and slightly to the left, placing himself between her and the worst of it. He did not touch her immediately. He only moved close enough that the force of the wind broke against him instead of her, and it was only then that she realized how exposed she had felt until he did.
His chest hovered just behind her back, near enough that she could feel the heat of him even through wool and damp air. When he reached past her, one arm on either side, and adjusted her hands on the rail, his fingers closed around hers for a moment before shifting them wider apart. The movement steadied her more than she wanted to admit.
"Look at Mull," he said, his voice low near her ear. "Nae the water. Just the island."
"I was looking at the island."
"Nay," he said. "Ye were staring at the sea as if stubbornness might tame it."
She turned her head slightly, forcing herself to find humor. "And did it seem persuaded?"
His answer came close enough that she felt it before she quite heard it. "Nae especially."
That should not have warmed her as much as it did.
She fixed her eyes on Mull again. Dark hills. A line of shore. Something solid.
"Better?" he asked.
"A little," she said.
He did not move away.