“You know,” Aisha slurred, her cheeks as red as her hair and her stomach more full of wine than not. Drunkenness had not drawn out sea sickness from her, but it had attracted Sammy to their table. “I dare say you only got lucky, if this is the extent of your strategic thinking, oh great Lucius von Solhart.”

The wine was getting to my pupil as well, and the more she smiled at him the more he smiled back. Getting her to open up from the gloom of fratricide was harder work than breaking the siege of Rackvidd, and, in the eyes of a teenager, the prize greater still. “Failure is the greatest teacher, my teacher once told me. And I dare say I’ve lost every way there is to lose in this game. So if I just don’t do those things again I can only win.”

“You can’t control the dice, though. Now can you?” Sammy said, but even as he did so the dice fell, the pips showed, and Lucius slapped his chips across the board in sets of two, neatly gating off Aisha’s routes.

Aisha gave a playful glare. “I was taught by the best hustlers in Tavina. You should feel honored that I’m teaching you,” she said, taking her own turn with a frustrated look at her piece held hostage at the start.

“It will be a wonderful novelty in Hearth Bay. Cards are the pastime of choice, or so I’m told. They’ve got artisans that paint them up in lacquer, but cheating is rampant. Some of the nobles think bending the rules like that proves superior wit…” He had scored most of his pieces, and those he hadn’t were marched like soldiers to the end.

“Dice are easy to cheat as well. Especially on a ship. Can never tell if they roll right,” she mumbled. She chewed her nail, staring at the boardstate but she could only do what the dice allowed.

“You could spin them, couldn’t you? Only balanced things can spin on their edge,” the doctor mused.

“Not on a ship you can’t,” Aisha said, and got a few chuckles from nearby sailors.

Sammy waved his drink around. “But I mean, if you’re both using the same dice, then it’s fair, isn’t it? Even if you knew one side was more likely than the next to show up, it’s not guaranteed, right? And then, what would you even do with that knowledge, right? What’s the fuss about? You’re playing for fun, anyways, aren’t you? I don’t see coins out and both of you are still fully dressed, so what are you playing for? Bragging?”

The two of them had taken turn after turn while he spoke. Rolling faster and faster as Lucius thinned his ranks without letting her hostage escape. The dice blessed him, showering him with doubles and rerolls. Aisha had similar luck, but without the means to seize upon it, not as far as her hostage was concerned. Eventually, he was forced to allow an opening, and she rallied, trying to send it fleeing across, but it was too late. The right dice turned up and he slowly scored his last chip.

“Lucky bastard,” she grumbled.

“I had a very good instructor.” Sadly, he was not referring to me.

Aisha folded her arms with a huff and turned away as her cheeks took on a new hue. “So is that your hometown, now?” she asked, gesturing towards the new colors on the horizon.

Sammy, with his attention on the slightly misshapen dice, said, “You’re looking in the wrong direction. The Solhart family rules over the territory just west of Jumeaux.”

Lucius and Aisha gave the boy a bit of a scowl, but he had the right of it. The crew could hear them. While Sammy tried to figure out if the dice were indeed loaded, Lucius rose and went to the side railing with the girl and quietly said, “Getting there. The territory but not the city. Looks like the forests have been cut down more since I last saw it. More fields, more people.”

“Must be nice to have such good farmland.”

“We have worse things to worry about than sand snakes though.”

“How? You don’t even have invading armies.”

“I told you, didn’t I? There are monsters in the mountains there, from the other side. Bears are the best thing you could find in your field. I met my first monster while I was being used as a toy by the Ashe girls.”

“A toy?”

“A dress-up, pretend prince,” he said with a laugh and a sneer. “I wonder what they’d say to me if they saw me at the king’s court?”

“I bet they’ll think you look like the hero they suspected you might be. If you didn’t piss yourself or something. I certainly thought my brother looked like one, when he saved me from a pack of jackals… they had come for one of our sick camels. Tore it to shreds while I shrieked, and some of them decided I would make a good meal too. Gaunt things of skin and bone and teeth that gnashed red with blood. It was my brother and his friends that showed up first to my shouts.”

She gave a forlorn smile and continued, “My idiot brother tried to use his stigmata to control one of the jackals, after he put an arrow in it. He learned the hard way that it didn’t work that way. He spent a week fumbling about on all fours like a dog. Turned out to be a higher price than I paid for it all. I was just scared for a moment. He was embarrassed for a week.”

“That’s how childish heroics tend to go. I ended up bedridden myself, listening to some drunk ramble.”

“But were you the hero?”

“One of them.”

They dragged young Lucius out to see the flowers bloom. Him, Fredericka, and the heir of the Ashe family, Annika, born to the middle sister and herself the older sibling to Edvin, set out under the protection of Claire Riverfall. Not a daring distance by any means, the four of them went only so far as a copse of scrub trees within sight of the city walls. A thicket used by peasants for harvesting firewood with well trod paths and plenty of wildflowers.

The older girls had done a cruel thing to Lucius, and dug out a set of child sized armor. A ceremonial thing made by artisan blacksmiths in an attempt to show what might be possible in the future, they had made a metal carapace of segmented plates. The girls stuffed the right arm full of rags and had it strapped onto him like a prosthesis with no grasper at all. It clattered with every step he took, dragging limp at his side. “Now, you’re part knight!” Frederika had declared.

Lucius could not find it within himself to see any benefit at all to his being there. Given the differences in age, both girls were a hand taller than him, and he had already seen how they treated their actual dolls, exactly the same. He didn’t even understand what was special about the woods. The best flowers were grown in gardens and sold to stupid girls like those two with him. Had they been looking for fresh tea, he might have understood.

Screams of children brooked little confusion.

A bear, thin and black, reared up before them. Snout beige and mottled red, it appraised the girls while it licked its jowels. Claire, the true knight, sprinted to the fray with sword drawn. “Get back! Back!” she shouted, though her words were directed at the beast. It was a mere animal, not at all interested in humans. Only Claire and Lucius understood that.

Annika and Frederika thought the command was for themselves and went running. “Boy! Get them!” Claire barked at Lucius, unable to go herself, not with a moaning bear twice her own weight before her. It had to be chased off before it could habituate to humans.

Lucius had no end of insults for the girls, within the confines of his mind, but no thought of abandoning them to their own fright and stupidity. Like a spell spoken to the world, his thought that they would get themselves killed brought out the worst in mankind. They had stumbled across two peasants with packs of sticks burdened upon their backs and bellies as empty as their purses. The peasants found before them more silver than they could have dreamed of.

They dropped the wood and drew steel.

“Hey!” Lucius barked, charging at the two rogues. Each had gotten a hand on one of the girls, taking kicks to the face and chest. They looked at one another, each expecting the other to deal with him, and in that unplanned moment Lucius threw his shoulder into the nearest. The three of them, Lucius, villain, and Annika, went rolling through the dirt.

With racing heart, he tried to scramble up to his feet. His eyes first laid upon Annika’s hand and he tried to grab it, only to mistakenly use his right hand, the impotent mannequin of steel.

“Get back!” the other barked. He had his foraging blade to Frederika’s throat. A crude, rough thing of nicks and cracks like a vicious saw. He, like the other rogue, was as rough as his blade. It could be seen in how his fingers clutched the hilt like claws. The hunger in the hunch of his back. They were starving men who just found hope, irregardless of the evil it entailed.

“Monsters,” Lucius spat back at them.

Then the other ran him through with his weapon. The steel pushed through clothes, belly, gut, and out the other side. Warmth gushed down Lucius’ body as his blood poured forth. “You idiot! What if that was Edvin?”

“Edvin’s blond, ain’t he? Come on, before the–”

Lucius stabbed the distracted man in the leg with his pocket knife. It was a tiny little thing, blunt and short and useful for nothing but prying shells open. The howl of agony from the man echoed through the thicket as Lucius lost consciousness. Claire Riverfall descended on the men like a rampaging dragon, but Lucius was spared from seeing the body parts litter the forest floor.

When he awoke naked and confused in one of the Ashe family beds, Jacque accused him of being a cheater.