For a few days, everything seemed to have been fixed with Kajsa. She was even able to return to work in the factory with Walter. The colony was able to engage in fruitful trade as hesitant merchants docked one after the next. They came with reasonable supplies–textiles and furs, which can always be sold for some amount of profit–and found themselves excitedly filling their hulls with rare foodstuffs to bring back to Rackvidd, or elsewhere in Vassermark. The murders seemed to have been stymied by the simple running out of bodies that the demon could use.

That very lull tormented his mind. It latched onto the worry hidden in his heart about what I would say of the alchemist. There was no deceiving his rational mind that he should kill her. The risk was absurd to bet upon a childhood relationship, barely rekindled over nursing an injury in a far away land. His entire life to that point, and the rest of his prospects, hinged upon maintaining the secrecy of his true identity. Of course, he didn't know it at the time, but this was the very danger that his sister, of the Solhart family, posed. He and I had made some passing comments that perhaps the family should be killed off as things went on. No one would suspect him of it. As the son of the family, he would be hard pressed to take a claim even if his sister and mother and aunts died off. Further, if they weren’t done in all at once, he would be expected to attend funerals and then what would we do?

Kajsa was a much simpler matter, which had two clean solutions. The first, I already mentioned. The second was to make her his. Not just as friends, not just as childhood acquaintances, but as a woman. He was reasonably certain he could do it, or rather, that a confident and determined version of him could make her his. Such a Lucius von Solhart did not exist however. He was a lad of eighteen and the only relationship of his prior to Aisha had ended in heartbreak. He barely even know the love and affection of a mother. The guilty sting of sending Aisha away still nagged at him and whispered in his mind that he ought not to advance anything with Kajsa until after Aisha’s return.

This made living at the manor quickly intolerable, and a man of his standing had but one solution.

After making sure that Lexa would personally protect Kajsa from further harm, he gathered up a posse. Axel, Polunu, and two dozen prisoners turned soldiers that his various sargeants indicated had some restlessness to them. Of course, they weren’t particularly happy about leaving the relative comfort of the city, but raiding had become a matter of booty and they could easily imagine what booty could get them now that they were de facto free.(1)

Raids had lately become less common, primarily because they had killed every outpost of kuku farmers they could find within a day’s sailing. Charting the depths of the archipelago had to be done again and again, cross referenced and double checked. An island might seem to be one place from the south, but unidentifiable from the north. Nothing magical about it, simply the difficulty of cartography. Lucius did not have to go so far however.

Rumor had come through to them that Aillesterrans had hidden themselves on a small island to the south known as Red Star Island, for the very uninspired reason that it had five jutting points of land that reached out from the central volcano. The fertile soil had been untilled and let to overgrow for no one lived on it–the belief was bad luck of haunted spirits–and that made for exceedingly private coves to tuck a ship away for a day or two. The fisherman had chanced upon it while diving for pearls and thought he hadn’t been seen. On promise of reward, he accompanied the group of soldiers to the island.

They landed upon the opposite side of the island, trekking over the mountain, for the slope was shallow even if the ground was sharp flints. While on the western slope, they laughed and goaded one another, but Lucius ordered their silence as soon as they crested the edge. The forest swallowed their voices well, but letting the pirates flee would be disastrous.

And there, as the fisherman said, was the sleek ship. Like a brown fish nesting for spring, it rocked between waves with the prow nuzzled up to a shore. Men dotted the sandy beach with no less than three cookfires. They had been on the island long enough to hunt pigs and deer, pygmy things but docile for lack of humans. The fat crackled in the blazes and the oily smoke reached even the Vassish half an island away. If there were a single predator to contend, it would have been nipping at the edge of their campsite.

There were only soldiers.

Better than mere prisoners, several of his soldiers had stigmata relevant to the raid. He suspected, and I would too, that their competency was the source of their restlessness and trouble making. So much the better. Five were deemed to be the vanguard. Two [Berserker]s, one man with [Gills], one with the always useful [Roar], and one man whose ability was described to me as the ability to make a mess of a rope.(2)

There was a good deal of wait, of creeping through the jungle hunched over to the mud. They approached as close as they dared, even felling one sentry with an arrow. The man hadn’t truly been expecting anyone to arrive, and they caught him by surprise. With that simple action, they pierced the flimsy shell of protection. By the time the shout came up from the ship, it was too late for the Aillesterrans. The bulk of the Vassish troops charged down the slope like a hammer and drove them into the waves. They thought they could escape by pushing their ship back to sea, but all of their rigging had been undone and they couldn’t even take out their rage on the advanced party for they had jumped back into the water.

One can imagine how the fight went in such a scenario of despair.

The important thing, for the story of Lucius, was that he took the captain alive. A man of middling age who roughly spoke Giordanan and thus could converse with Lucius. He introduced himself as Shiro, looking more at the sword in Lucius’ grasp than at him.

“How many more of you are there?” the asked, letting his armed prisoners run amok with the camp. There were no women according to his glance, so he let them have their violence as they saw fit.

“Many,” Shiro said.

“How are you feeding yourselves? You come to islands like this? What do you do, hunt until your ships are full and go attack again?”

“Something like that,” the pirate responded. He was on his knees in the sand, his boots washed by the sea brine. Still, he sneered.

“Are you being paid by your government?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Sorry, my mistake. What a cultural faux pas. Are you being paid by your shrines to be out here on holy war? Does the snake really care so much about the people of the sea?”

Shiro spat to the side and licked his teeth clean of blood. He had a few cuts across his body, but the felling blow had been a punch to the mouth by Lucius himself–hard enough to knock the sense out of him and loosen some teeth. “You think we can’t see? You’ve devoured Giordana and now you’ll burn the lands of Lumis because they don’t want to bend the knee. Why would anyone think you’re going to stop?”

A few things went through his mind at that. The certainty that war would reach the forests of Aillesterra, that he himself would be at the front, and the curiosity of how the war was about to unfold. Perhaps it had begun already.(3) Such prophesies helped him little at all.

“Are you working for the cyclops?” he asked.

That made Shiro grin. His anxious and pained wavering slowed as he finally raised his gaze to look Lucius in the eye. “Wouldn’t you like to know? The sins of your past come back to burn you.”

“Axel,” Lucius barked, standing up from the impromptu interrogation. He scanned the carnage quickly. Only his men still moved, and they mostly moved to parcel out booty amongst themselves. They squabbled over trinkets and bottles of liquor while others slipped purses into their own pockets. His second in command was not bothered by such temptations.

Axel had been traversing the battlefield, stabbing one man after the next through the heart to bleed them out quickly. His actions were careful and deliberate. No malice moved his hands for they were not the kuku farmers that had terrorized his people; merely foreigners. The cruel kind of mercy brought many their deaths, but when Lucius called out to him, some few were left to crawl off and die alone. “What is it?”

The two of them had to speak in Vassish, leaving Shiro nearly in the dark as Lucius said, “Tie this one up. We’re going to put him on display with the others. Or at least, I want him to see that we might. I want him walked past the criminals then left in a prison for a day or two with no food. Get him a doctor if you must, but I’ll speak with him when he’s softened up.”

Axel grinned. “The fire of battle is tying his tongue?”

“It might be and I don’t feel like torturing him at the moment. It’s tiring.”

“But you’ll starve him?”

“Yes.”

Axel bowed. “At your command, peace bringer.”

After the first incident, Lucius had to create a sort of naval guard to make sure none of his indentured warriors were stealing off onto ships and at least one captain was imprisoned for hiring the men on. Escapees became quite rare after that. This fellow ended up getting killed in a tavern brawl a few days before I arrived. From what I could gather for my studies, he wasn’t a very bright individual. He had been imprisoned for gambling debt and then for attacking his guards. That escalated from a rather benign labor farm to the gold mine. He thought the unravelling made a great party trick. Fishermen with nets to mend disagreed. Historians would later agree that the war had started at this point, as there is disagreement over whether a formal war was ever declared or even required. Of course, I am the authority on the matter.