The two of them awoke the next morning, having nearly fallen asleep beside the fire, and emerged to see that misfortune had followed them to the morning. The Aillesterran pirate ship still sat on the horizon. One by one, they joined me at the back of the ship, frowning at the lurking predator.

“I think we have your midnight swim to thank for this,” I mused once my pupil had joined me. “That, and whoever is captain of that ship is a very brave man.”

“Or woman,” Aisha said, strolling towards us as she tied her hair up in a high bun.

“Unlikely, given the Aillesterran culture,” I muttered to myself. Vassermark barely had women captains, and the country was nearly ran by that gender. She didn’t hear me though.

Lucius asked, “You’re not going for another swim, are you?”

“Not today,” she said, and planted her hands on her hips, a new light in her eyes. “I thought this might happen, and, after sleeping off the wine, I have an idea.”

Lucius and I exchanged a look. “Go on?” he said.

“You,” she said, pointing at me. “You’re a wizard, aren’t you?”

“I prefer the term scholar.”

“You’ve got the robe and the unknowable knowledge to bargain with the emissaries of the gods. You’re a wizard.” I still don’t know why she didn’t cite my physical appearance. I had the same intenseness of reality that Golden had.

“What’s your point?” I asked.

She lifted up her chin and ordered, “Prepare some wizardry to keep the sea monsters away from us, and we’ll detour to another of the sea lanes. When the pirates follow us, either they get eaten themselves, or they’ll get eaten when they run away.”

To my surprise, I had to actually think her proposal over. I had been distracted with thoughts of boarding them and killing them all, but had been troubled by the idea that we couldn’t actually force them to get close enough for combat. If they were skittish, we would never catch them. Lucius and I were of a mind that the last thing permissible was to show them the way to Hearth Bay.

“Aisha,” my pupil said, his voice soft and condescending. “Magic isn’t something that can just be forced out like that. Even I, with my own stigmata, can barely control the rate at which I heal.”

She frowned. “I can see that, Mr. One Eye. He hasn’t told me what his stigmata can do, but his attitude says enough that he has plenty of tricks up his sleeves. So, I think I’ve given a perfect solution. Can you do it?”

“Girl, there are things below these waters older than mankind itself. Beings with forms that would strike terror into your heart to even comprehend. Tentacles and thorns, mouths within mouths and eyes on every side. Creatures able to swallow you whole without killing you, able to preserve your life for days, weeks, months even, until it has settled down to digest. Creatures which obey no master but the strong. There is good reason that sailors fear the open sea.”

She was not implacable in her bravery. I could see the color fade from her face. And yet, before Lucius could interrupt and thank her for the courageous idea, she said, “You didn’t answer my question though.”

I grinned. “Of course I can do it, but you’ll be the one to convince the captain of it.”

“Mas– Amurabi! You can’t be serious,” my pupil blurted out.

I threw up a hand dismissively. “Why not? It’s a good idea. It’s easier to drive off a sea serpent than to pin a ship into a corner. Especially one that’s faster than us. That’s a slave ship. They’ve got dozens of oarmen aboard. If they felt like it, they could overtake us within the day, and then where would we be? With one good fighter trying to protect us all? And that’s if they’re interested in fighting us in the first place. They probably are just scouting the way north, with orders to report back to the Cyclops. The fishing villages along the way have more to fear than we do. If we mislead them, we might sink their entire fleet without having to lift a finger.”

“Would they even follow us?” Lucius asked.

Aisha shrugged. “Why wouldn’t they? How would they know we’re between the sea lanes? I’m sure they would follow us no matter what we did, if their plan is to chart the way.”

Lucius looked from me to her, and back again. He relented. “Well, bring it up to the captain when he wakes. He spent the whole night navigating. He won’t be up for a while.”

I nodded. “I imagine we’ll have to throw anchor tonight and hope for the best.”

The two young ones drifted away, ready to await Captain Bodin’s awakening. I thought this would give me time to ponder how to actually drive off a sea serpent, without angering Saphira, but my time came under assault from the doctor. He exacted from me a promise for a discussion of pain reducers and anti-inflammatories, which was my own fault for having commented on the issues of liquor as a painkiller.

In half privacy, Lucius and Aisha strolled the deck, treating it like some noble’s garden rather than a strip of decking no longer than two houses end to end. “You’re doing better,” he said.

“Only a little. I just, sort of, packed the troubles down and away. I’ve had my cries, I’ve done my soul searching. It still hurts. I’m still anxious whether Raymi will be fair to the Medini’s. I don’t know what I can do about the pain though. There are things I can do to be useful though.”

“You’re a bard, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be composing epic poems about my victories?”

“Oh? You mean like how you lost your eye?” Lucius winced. “How you lost the most important duel of the siege?” He hung his head. “How you got saved by a girl?”

“Hold on!” he said. “You were that girl, that’s not fair.”

She laughed. “Tell that to all the people of Vassermark who will hear the true story of Lucius von Solhart. They won’t ever suspect that I’m talking about myself, now will they? You’re the hero, not me. Don’t worry though, I’ll be sure to make everyone fall in love with you, the frontline commander.”

“Everyone?”

She paused and smiled. She chose to play coy. “No promises on everyone. Now, if we’re stuck here waiting for the captain to wake up, why don’t you continue your story? I’ve never met a man who chose to go feral in the woods.”

“You’ve never even seen woods.”

“So tell me about them.”

The iron mines that made Jarnmark prosper dotted the eastern slopes. The miners had a generational slosh to their residences, following the discovered ore veins. Like the floor of a banquet hall, the vermin scurry from one dropped piece of food to the next. It gave the hills a mottled look, a mismatch of old growth trees, farms, and fallow scrubs. The land could hardly keep up with the movements of people, could hardly find the fast growing seeds to repopulate the ghost towns with trees.

Lucius was dumped at the edge of civilization and marched west with all the determination a child could muster. He was lucky the merchant didn’t happen to take him to his home town. A passing glance at a family member might have broken his foolishness and sucked him back to a forgettable existence. I would never have found him.

Beyond the farms laid a realm of hunters and trappers. Mountain men of different sort entirely from the Black Keep lived nomadic lives in the mountains. Young, mostly. To slay a bear and haul its carcass back to civilization took strength quickly lost with age. Lucius mistook their cultivated footpaths to be natural however. He thought it normal for lines of dirt to tread nearly straight through the weave of birches and pines, ever winding up the rocks.

His first night came to an end with him still eating a bundle of meat and cheese given to him by the Ashe family as a parting gift, a funeral offering of a sort. That first night, he didn’t know hunger, only the discomfort of rocks and roots digging through the woolen cloak in his sleep. Even the weather abided him, the wind slow and the air only chill.

The next morning, he awoke with the vague impression that he ought to hunt. That was what people in the woods did, so he ought to do it. He had a nearly blunt sword and a strap of leather to serve as a sling. With no sense of how to hunt, he merely chose a direction and began walking west.

He missed every bird he spotted, even the songbirds. Hour by hour, his own incompetency began to manifest before him. It haunted every step he took with the sure knowledge that he couldn’t stab dinner to death, and he couldn’t hit a bird with a stone if his life depended on it, quite literally.

The sun set on him, casting the green glades into gloom and darkness as he sat and stared at the strap of leather and his own hands. It gnawed at him, it burned inside him. Whenever his thoughts drifted from the immediate, front he hunger inside him and the blisters on his fingers, he heard the sneering of the children of the Ashe family. He felt the pain in his face and chest where Edvin had struck him. He remembered Frederika crying against his side.

It took him hours of sitting, huddled arms around knees in the darkness and cold before his mind finally lingered on what he should have done to start a fire. He slept in the protection of a pine knell and awoke with an empty stomach. Fundamentally, his problem was that he was not left-handed. Ignorance and childhood aside, he simply didn’t have the coordination to put a rock through a bird’s head.

On the third day, the pains of hunger began to set in, which drew in the demon of regret. He began to wonder if he had made a mistake, if forsaking the chains of civilization had been too rash. His hunting had been fruitless, his supply of packed food run out, and he had come to realize the Ashe family sent him out on expectation that he would die.

Nature did provide for him however. West of the peaks, days of hiking beyond the farms of Jarnmark, Lucius did find unspoiled bounty. Nothing more than a berry bush, but enough fruit to fill his stomach as he gorged by the handful. It sustained him the day, but on the next he had picked it clean. Hunger returned as he tried to practice with the sling. Desperation pulled the neurons in his head to a fine tension like tuning a lyre, forcing them to suck in the knowledge and apply it as more days passed.

His will broke in the second week, but his aimless wandering through caribou paths had taken him far and away from the gentle mountain pass he had used. The mountains stood high, bleak, unforgiving. They cast night across the land late into the morning and made the wind cold and howling. A wall put up by nature stood between him and civilization.

He killed his first bird on the ninth day and ate it raw. His hunger permitted no less. It marked a savage turning point for him though, for he had finally learned the art of the sling. So far from his homeland the animals scarcely knew what a human was, just some bipedal thing they saw here and there. Birds had no reason to care about fur trappers, which left them complacent and easy targets.

Danger truly came when he met something as large as himself and just as famished; a spring-time bear.