The Lumius Temple west of the mountains had been built strongly, I suspect as a bastion against dragons. The timbers aged, cut from old growth heartwood, soaked in swamp water to cure them over the span of years, and sturdily fastened like the rib cage of a beast about the hall. While construction has certainly 8improved over the decades, the sheer quality of material can scarcely be matched. And so it was, that for all these outward defenses, it had become home to a godling, like the furtive hiding of a hermit crab.

At the time of Lucius’ discovery of us, I had yet to venture inside. Choosing to take my time preparing for the destruction of the divine leech, I and my other pupil had made camp in one of the other ruins of the village. Once it might have been a tavern, but the weather had torn down half the chimney and collapsed the kitchen entirely. The lightest rain seemed through the mossy boards, but it was better than nothing while I made my preparations.

It was my pupil, Ezra, that spotted the young gremlin. Dirty, bewildered, and unable to form words; but, the last was from confusion not ineptness of mind. “Master Amurabi, there’s a savage here,” Ezra called to me. She had been sent to fetch firewood for us, and didn’t see the need to even drop the bundle.

“There are no savages in these lands, only foolish hunters.”

“I’ve never heard of a little boy working as a hunter. He’s even only got one arm.”

That drew my attention from the delicate carving, enough that I emerged from the ramshackle hovel and looked over the boy. Lucius impetuously said, “I’m not little,” which only made me more certain of who he was.

“Well, I can hardly imagine there are multiple boys your age with a single arm. I thought you were the pet of the Ashe family?”

Lucius’ face went red with anger. It boiled up inside him so fiercely, he didn’t know what to do with it, whether to storm off or attack me or not. “I am nobody’s pet!”

“Slave then, would you prefer that term? How did you end up here? Did they send an expedition or something? Has some fool come to slay a dragon? Where is the rest of the Ashe family?”

He sneered and had the audacity to turn up his nose at me. “I’m not a slave either. I’m here by myself.”

“A runaway then.”

“Free! Nobody owns me, and nobody shall!”

He didn’t seem to be even yet in puberty, not a hair on his chin nor a crack to his voice. “Well, you look like you’ve been having a dreadful time of your freedom. Shouldn’t you go back to your parents or something? There are monsters out here.”

He stared back at me, keeping his impulses in check. I can only imagine what went through his mind, the frustration with his parents who sold him, the minstrel who passed him on, and then how his stint of freedom had gone. “I learned a few things.”

I don’t know how he did it, but he chose words that struck directly at me. I don’t think he had ever met a scholar or an engineer or the like before, much less a wizard, which is why it caught my attention so much that he would use those words. A tangential admission of failure, but a defiant one. With my curiosity piqued, I ordered Ezra to stop standing around and stoke the fire some more, before it guttered out and left us to the elements. Then I asked him, “And what have you learned?”

Despite never once hearing a schoolmaster’s voice, he understood that he was being tested. He appraised me, choosing between his memories, and settled upon saying, “A dragon won’t eat you if it’s already full.”

I stroked my beard. “No, they won’t. They aren’t obligate eaters, as they say. So, what can you do with this information?”

He chewed his lip and squeezed his hand into a fist. The fatigue and hunger had him nearly at his wit’s end, but it also gave a certain desperate edge. “I could use it to sneak back through the mountains and go back to Jarnmark.”

“If you had a great deal of courage, yes. So, why are you here?”

“Because that place is no better than here.”

“But, Jarnmark has people. Your family I presume, employment, the temples, armies to protect you. There are no dragons in the east.”

“The armies never protected me from the people there.”

“And yet right now, you seem to be cold, dirty, hungry, and on the verge of sickness.”

“I don’t get sick.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“Never. Not even when my arm was smashed.”

I confess, at this time I saw him as little more than some stimulation for Ezra, to teach her a thing or two about managing people beneath her. To some degree, I pitied him, for he had gone out into the wilderness with neither the tools nor the knowledge to survive. Had he truly been a savage, his parents would have taught him the ways, but he had a city breeding that left him bereft of such things. “You saw what the girl did just now, didn’t you? Bring me as much wood and I will fill your stomach for the night,” I said, and turned my back on him.

Lucius wanted to curse me, for the impossible task. It was a rude thing, and he barely had the vocabulary to express it. With but a single hand, gathering deadfall was more than twice as difficult for him. Any normal child would have balked and cried, complained and tried to get food without the work. Lucius turned his back on the village and went back to the woods. He stripped off his shirt, gritty as it was, and fashioned it into a sling into which he piled branches. Perhaps at some time earlier in his life, he had seen a forester out with a back rack to carry heaps of firewood, but the most he could imitate was the use of his shirt grasped together in his one hand.

Some two hours later, he cast the pile down before us, defiantly. It was a meager pile, with branches barely fit for kindling. Without any steel tools, he had been unable to cut down larger branches to carry, so he could claim only that which he could snap off with hand and foot. It sufficed however.

“Feed him,” I ordered Ezra.

“You can’t be serious, master!” she cried, drips of stew on her chin.

“He held up his end of the bargain.”

“You made it too easy on him! This isn’t some roadside inn with spare room in the bed, you’re doing real work here.”

“If the boy understands a shred of what he sees, then that is his knowledge to earn. Now, feed him.”

Ezra gritted her teeth and groaned, glaring daggers at young Lucius. That did nothing but make him keep up his defenses, like a turtle withdrawing to its shell. He didn’t say anything back, and waited. He had delivered the firewood, which Ezra should have been thankful for because it saved her the next day’s labor, and he was due payment. The stew we had that night made quite the impression on him, for it was his first experience with spicy food. I had brought with me some dried peppers from Drachenheim, giving the deer meat some flavor mixed with the vegetables. Ezra and I were fans of it, and she grinned, watching Lucius try to not admit his mouth felt ablaze.

The food was hearty nonetheless, with meat and root, and enough clean water for him to replenish himself. While he ate, I stole a few glances at his bare chest. His shirt still laid wrapped about the wood, and so I saw his stigmata. “Your sigil there,” I said, pointing at the divine marking. “What does it do for you?”

“It makes me heal quick.”

In my experience, there were at least a dozen things he could have meant by his simple statement, and I did not expect a boy his age to have the intellectual vocabulary to explain the difference. “Might I have a look at it?”

“You might… for breakfast tomorrow.”

I grinned a toothy grin that might have made him think I would eat him. “You drive a hard bargain, and you’ve made me quite interested. I accept.” I beckoned him over to Ezra’s dismay, and read through the magic imprinted upon his body. The last thing I expected was what I found. He had been precisely right. His stigmata made him heal. No caveats or catches.

I had found a diamond in the rough, and he had found a jeweler able to take the dirt from him to make him shine brighter than any star.

“So, who’s this Ezra?” Aisha asked, flatly inspecting him as the Sea Bird’s Rest drew past the Donjon.

“My senior pupil.”

“Oh? So you’re not the wizard’s prodigy?”

He laughed so much the crew thought he was insulting the dead. The Donjon certainly had their collection of dead on display as well. Hard to see in the setting sun, but across the southern wall, they had a collection of hanged corpses, those who had been convicted of treason against the crown. The guards killed them by tossing them off the side with a rope around their neck. If their head didn’t pop right off, their corpse was left. By the time we sailed past, there were some two hundred stuck to the stone side, like so many charm necklaces in a swindler’s cart.

“No,” Lucius said. “If anyone, Ezra was the prodigy.”

“And where is she now?”

He frowned and wrapped his arms around the ship railing so that he could peer at the dim horizon. “I don’t know. Master Amurabi should know, but he hasn’t told me. It doesn’t matter, we aren’t exactly friends.”

“Oh? Is that so?”

“Would you be friends with a less skilled junior who stole your master’s attention away from you?”

“Point taken. Well, night has caught up with us. I think now is the time for me to steal a bottle of rum. I don’t think I’ll be able to get a wink of sleep if I’m thinking about giant serpents attacking us.”

“They won’t,” he promised, and the two departed from one another for the night, going separately though he wished he could join her. Instead, he came to the back of the ship, to where I and Honung were watching the waters. He in prayer, me in scrutiny.

“We’re being followed,” I said.

“Yes, by pirates.”

“No, by a whale hunter.”