Raulin had to admit that Al’s plan was either foolhardy or genius. After a few days, he’d given Anla several Arvonnese lessons without anyone batting an eyelash. Not that she needed it; she was quite good, but practice always made perfect.

Over that time, the four started to create relationships with each other, a rather strange concept since they were essentially pretending to be friends with people they were already good friends with. Al did a great job, playing someone very eager to get to know Raulin while also seeming a little afraid. This was the same man who had mimed that awful skulking step back in Iascond. He had really come a long way.

Telbarisk remained aloof. Raulin suspected he didn’t quite understand what they were doing and felt left out.

It would seem strange if Anla didn’t speak to the man who was teaching her Arvonnese, so she occasionally made polite conversation. They appeared like acquaintances, but often they spoke of deeper things. Through these their relationship had come to be something less tumultuous. He promised to give the situation thought, since the idea of abandoning his friends in Kitstuar was revolting, yet the problem of needing to stay with Atelo was daunting.

A little over a week after they had set sail, Raulin was thinking with his back against a railing near the mizzenmast. He found the sailors that worked there tended to leave him alone and that it wasn’t a busy part of the ship. It allowed him to enjoy the peace of the sea, especially in the early morning.

Except, someone was blocking his sun. He opened his eyes and saw a figure crouching down in front of him. They kept moving, making it hard for him to see who it was until she laughed.

“Maya, you’re hurting my eyes. Stay still, please.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Why are you up here?”

“Thinking. I have a lot on my mind.”

“What about?”

He lowered his voice. “Nothing really serious. Because Atelo is with me, I’ll have to go straight to Arvarikor and retrain. Which way to go, though? Take another ship across the Mielik Sea to Breaverie and go north or cut across Noh Amair by horse the whole way?”

“Riveting material to churn.”

“You asked.”

“I thought there might be other things you were thinking of.”

He sighed. “Of course there is, but it’s not easy. How are four people going to outsmart the world’s best spies? If I entertain the thought of setting up some place for you three, I need to know what that will look like and I can’t see a situation that’s safe that works for everyone.”

“You know we wouldn’t mind living tucked away-”

“You would, though. Eventually one of you, maybe all three of you, will mind and you’ll resent my position. You’ll tell me what I’m giving isn’t good enough, that I spend too much time away, that you’re tired of living under all the protocol and precautions. It will be too much.”

“It won’t be. I promised I’d be with you and I plan on keeping that promise.”

“Even though I didn’t. Say it.”

She turned her head down for a moment, causing the sun to sting his eyes once more. “Yes, you hurt me again, but at least you’re doing it for better reasons. I…I get it. I know how hard this is for you. I know you’re doing what you can.”

He looked at her for a few moments before speaking. “You’re too damn good for me.”

“I know,” she said smiling. He wished with every fiber in his being that he could hold her and kiss her in that moment, but he couldn’t risk it. Things were working well in the moment and he didn’t want to lose what little he had with Anla.

“I’m sorry. I wish I was better for you.”

“You are what you are and that’s enough for me,” she said without hesitation.

“It isn’t. You deserve a husband like who I wanted to be. I had such high hopes for our future.”

“We’ll figure this out.”

He bowed his head for a moment. “I’ll…I’ll seriously consider what we can do once I figure out which path we’ll take. Soon.”

She smiled. “That’s enough for me, for now. I’ll leave you to think. I guess you’ll have to make a decision, then.” She stood and touched his shoulder briefly as she passed, but he barely felt her touch and didn’t notice her departure.

There it was again, the deja vu. “Ten,” he whispered. Al had said “ten” and there was the same feeling, like he had put on new shoes perfectly worn to his feet. And now, she had said those words and he was numbed by the shock of having known this would happen almost a year ago.

He didn’t have a clairvoyant merit. He couldn’t have known he would be in the position to have his dear friend and his wife speak certain phrases when he was aboard the Spirowan. He could pass off the coincidence of two people saying not unusual sentences, but the feeling was identical up until the deja vu took over. Someone had grabbed these moments and told him they would happen a year ago.

Why? To what purpose? And more importantly, who?

There was only one being he could think of that would do this, or perhaps not one but twelve. It wasn’t the first time he had felt guided by an unseen hand. From time to time, he had seen some whisper of events over the last two decades that could be interpreted as divine intervention. That, though, from the shipwreck to the premonition, the last year of his life, had been the strongest he’d seen.

Perhaps They were getting impatient.

Raulin actually didn’t mind feeling like a pawn. He’d been raised knowing that, while one day he’d be a powerful man even if he was an archprince and not the king, he’d never have the choices most men had in their lives. His wife, his clothing, his itinerary, they would all be chosen for him. It had actually seemed strange to live a life without those assurances.

Is that what this was, then? The Twelve had shown him his future and told him that this would happen, but only if he chose well? It seemed he had done little other than love three people to get here. Were They telling him this was going to happen, whether or not he wanted it? Or was this a new kind of assurance, divine hands on his shoulders telling him that They were there and to trust in Them, and to trust in his friends?

The problem with either was that he still hated the Arvonnese. How could you rule a people that had done such atrocious things to their monarchy? Brutal murders, of children and adult alike, the pillage of the palace and the family’s heirlooms…He’d even heard someone had paraded his father’s corpse around after Dilvestrar had been taken. That was the biggest obstacle for him, imagining himself waving and smiling atop a horse during a promenade while the people that had run his mother through were on the sidelines. It made him nauseous.

Al seemed to think this whole thing was more like an apple or a potato, that you could cut out the rot and eat the rest. He was an enthusiastic lover of Arvonne, though, and not an unbiased source. Still, it would be fair to hear all the evidence he could present for his case.

Raulin made his way to the lounge area outside the larger cabins. Al was speaking with the young banker, who had slowly come out of his shell over the last week. When his friend looked up, he said, “Sir, it occurred to me that you might want to try to learn a few key phrases in Arvonnese.”

“Oh,” he said, standing, “that sounds like a good idea.”

Once the door to the cabin was shut, Al grabbed a quill, ink, and a piece of paper. “What are you doing?” Raulin asked.

“I should actually write something down before we get into what you really want to talk about. Give me a few simple phrases and we’ll pretend we worked on them.”

Raulin slowly gave him five sentences, resisting the urge to make him say something silly as a joke. “You’d come across as rather uppercrust and formal to a farmer, but I think most would get that you don’t speak it fluently.”

Al furrowed his eyebrows, but said nothing. “So, why did you pull me in here?”

“I don’t want you to read into this, but I have a request. I’d like you to tell me what you know of the Coup. I want you to give me a detailed overview, I want you to name sources, and I want you to be as unbiased as possible.”

Al blinked a few times as he sat on the bed. “Okay. I’m a little unprepared, but I’ll do my best. I should probably start prior to the Coup and lead up to it. It was noted by several authors, Cragic, Samillan, Shorst-Verime, to name a few, that the rule of King Aubin LVII wasn’t remarkable in the negative sense. The monarchy was seen as a little out-of-touch, perhaps a little too steeped in tradition, but not to a noteworthy extent. Kilvis suggested that the population of Arvonne found it a bit difficult to relate to their ruling family. There were no indications that the people felt they were oppressed or underrepresented or even downtrodden. Economic charts of the decade prior show that-”

“’Not prepared’?” Raulin said, scoffing. “Wizard, do you fall asleep at night to this report?”

“I have done some extensive research, for fun,” he said, smirking. “You know my hobbies. Now, economic charts showed that there were no major issues. Trade was doing well, as it’s something Arvonne has always excelled at. There were no more border excursions than normal, and most were naval. Kerchon, Cragic, Tuin Ev Diak all spent hundreds of pages discussing how there were no major reasons why this should have happened.”

“The people must have been unhappy for some reason. Move on to the night of the Coup.”

Al spoke for a full twenty minutes about key figures, numbers, strategy, weapons and armor, whatever information he had. “So, as I said, the numbers tallied about a thousand bodies that lay seige to Dilvestrar, and another thousand in the city itself, making sure no one escaped. It was an overwhelming maneuver, like a sucker punch to the monarchy. Once the Alscaines were killed, the battle was over.”

“And since then?”

“I’ve heard of five or six attempts to wrest the government from the Chancellor in the last eighteen years. There was a principal who had a strong claim, until he was assassinated with his mistress about seven years ago. The people are very unhappy. There is massive inflation, starvation, unemployment, and disease. As Arvonne is a large country, it’s spread out and there are some places relatively untouched by the problems brought on by Kalronism, but overall, the people want things to go back to the way things were.

“Have you heard of Riban Al Kestrani?”

“No.”

“He’s been conducting surveys of Noh Amair for several decades. Well, he did. He stopped traveling and stayed in Arvonne for the last seventeen years. He’s been interviewing the people, asking them questions, and giving concrete numbers on their opinions. The government did well for a few years and people were hopeful that things would be okay, maybe even better than when it was a monarchy. The numbers started falling about fifteen years ago and they are pretty low. I think the last one I saw, from two years ago, was at one sixth approving, one fifth neutral, and the rest disapproving.”

“All right,” Raulin said, standing. “Thank you.”

“That’s it? I mean, do you have any other questions or need any more information?”

“Not right now, but I’ll ask you if I do.”

“Okay,” Al said, hiding his disappointment poorly.

“Ar vrido,” he said. “Repeat that clumsily when I open the door.” Raulin said a string of phrases in Arvonnese, then “Ar vrido”, which Al stretched out with unfamiliarity.

He bumped into the captain next, who was happy to take him to his cabin to discuss his own personal thoughts on his travels in Arvonne. “It’s hard to describe. The structures are mostly fine, though not kept up well, but the people don’t look functional. It’s hard to find certain things in the cities, even in Eri Ranvel. Some smaller towns have been abandoned. Certain industries are wiped out, which is sad when you realize some very specific skill sets died in the last few decades.”

“Have you spoken to anyone about their feelings on the Chancellor and the government?”

Jorme snorted. “They hate him, plain and simple. They speak of that openly. They don’t even care if anyone overhears them. I could hum you three tavern songs about that. My favorite one is called ‘Not Enough Rope in All the Lands’.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate you taking the time to speak to me.”

“If I may, I don’t know what’s going on with you and your friends, but I want you to seriously consider whatever it is they want. Those are true friends, people willing to uproot their entire lives to help you out. You don’t come across those too often.”

“I am considering it and I do know their worth.”

Later on, sometime past lunch, he was idly playing with Anla’s hair as she rested her head against his bare chest. “Do you know anything about the Coup?” he asked.

She lifted her head up. “Not very much. My father refused to talk about it. I asked my mother once about that, and she told me a story from when I was very young. She said it was the only time she was ever really afraid of my dad.”

“How so?”

“He came home early from a late summer route with a bottle of whiskey. He sat in the rocking chair by the fire and drank about half of it before he said a word. He screamed and raged, he cried, he snarled at my mother when she tried to talk to him. Then, he drank the rest and passed out after chucking the bottle against a tree.”

“Did she say why he was so angry?”

“She said he told her it was like they had destroyed Arvonne. To him, the Alscaines were Arvonne, the national identity of his home. He was very bitter about it for many years.”

And finally, later that evening, he found Tel on the forecastle, untangling a net. He sat next to his friend and said, “You’ve always said that you’d be available if I needed someone to talk to.”

He put down the net and smiled. “Always.”

And they talked for a very long time, not just then but over the course of three days, in snippets or in large, involved conversations that stretched for hours.

Raulin found himself on the bow of the ship early in the morning of the fourth day, alone yet not. He pressed his hands into the rail, leaning out to greet the rising sun.

“Never thought I’d be in this position,” he said quietly, “but You win. I won’t fight this anymore. It’s time to go back and take what’s mine. I’ll accept any and all help, if You’re listening, though I think You’ve already sent it.” He sighed. “So, I guess what I’m saying is yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”