“I seem to be looking at living proof that mankind is born into the world in a state of nature, a savage fresh from the womb. It is only through the sham thing called education that chains are put upon him, and you, boy, are what happens when man is cut off from his parents and is doubly blessed with vigor,” Jacque said. He sat beside the window with a cup of tea.

Lucius laid out across the bed, his gut mummified in bandages and famished. “What’s a state of nature?”

The writer frowned and made the arduous decision between speaking for his own benefit, and speaking for the boy’s. “Do you consider yourself free?”

Lucius blinked back and felt his stomach rumble and growl. “I consider myself hungry.”

Jacque sighed and rang a servant bell that had been left for when Lucius awoke. In due course, one of the maids brought in a gluttony of bread and soup for him to gorge himself upon. “To answer my own question, you seem to be the least free person that I’ve ever met. If these nobles had you in a collar and leash it could not be more obvious. Why?”

Lucius choked down the food, pounding his chest and washing the lump down with more soup broth. When he could, he turned to the writer and said, “Are you an idiot?” The caught Jacque by surprise, so galled him the boy was able to go on. “There are bears and bandits outside the city, and I’ll be beaten if I stay inside the city without a home.”

“But look at you! You were run through by a sword last night and already you are healed. What do you have to fear from bandits? The goddesses have blessed you with a gift so strong you may as well be cheating at life. What does society offer you that would make you accept this yoke?”

Lucius had none of his high minded theorizing. “And if the bear eats me next time? Am I supposed to just heal from being turned into a giant pile of dung? I can be hurt,” he said, pointing his stump at the man.

Jacque set his tea down and paced the room. “But with your strength, you would be the one to slay the bear. Just think how strong you could become, living in nature.”

“What nature? There’s people everywhere. Even before my parents sold me off, everything was farms, orchards, or some private hunting ground where I nearly got trampled by a horse! Leave me alone you idiot.”

Jacque did not leave him alone. He paced and thought, and twisted his mustache whiskers and formed a new question for his bed-ridden victim of words. “You don’t even have family holding you here, and so young. Too young for you to be interested in girls, yes?”

The boy tried to hide his flush by eating more bread, stuffing it into his maw until he could smoothly say, “I’d have to meet a girl worth being interested in first.”

Jacque burst out laughing. “I should thank you for teaching me something. A true man of nature has his wits and cunning from even the earliest age. Any lest and he would surely perish. But, from your youth, like an ant upon the ground you see so little. You have not yet seen the options around you. It does not even occur to you that the land west of the mountains is no one’s hunting ground. You simply have never escaped beyond the bounds of civilization. There, a powerful man could truly thrive as one with nature.”

“Are you calling me short?”

Jacque’s renewed laughter drew in more unwanted visitors. Frederika and Annika, accompanied by their aunt Ruby, stormed in, evidently alerted by the maid. “You’re alive. Good,” Annika stated, fists on her hips.

Frederika burst into a blubbering mess of tears and through her face into Lucius’ side as her attempt to thank him. Their aunt grinned at the group of them, and said, “If anything is lacking in hospitality, it will be provided for. I won’t stand anything less for our little hero.”

“Look at him,” Jacque said. “Any more you could provide him would do nothing but spoil him. The only thing he wants for is his lost arm.”

With the impudence only a young noble could have, Annika shoved up Lucius’ sleeve to take a look at his stump. It had changed. A subtle, budding growth that only Lucius himself noticed. It was a tiny thing, the return of a certain mole flecked upon his skin that he recalled from his earlier youth. A mole the barber had hacked off to save him from the collapse. He was so taken by the sight, he didn’t even think to tell the girls to stop looking at it like he was a freak.

“We should get that covered,” Ruby said, chewing a nail and swaying.

Frederika shook her head. “I think it looks interesting though. We shouldn’t have forced you to wear that metal thing. A man who can fight without an arm is much more a knight than one who hides it.”

“I’m not a knight,” Lucius said, at last burying his arm in the blankets.

Annika walked around the other side of the bed, and tugged his shirt down. Before he could pull away, she got a look at his stigmata scrawled across his chest. Back then, it was just as large as it was in adulthood, so it sprawled from one side to the next over his immature frame. Just the same way as a child might marvel at the scaffolding to make a building, without an inkling of an idea why any particular piece was where it was, Annika could only see the stigmata as a work of art.

Lucius yanked his shirt out of her grasp and pulled it tight. “Don’t look at that.”

Annika reared up at him. “What gives you the–”

“Anne,” Ruby snapped. “He saved your life, not the other way around. How would you feel if he asked you to take your dress off?” That mollified the older girl, wilted her like a flower set beside a fire. The younger girl, Frederika, giggled, her tears since wiped away.

Jacque swirled his cup of tea and said, “If I’m not mistaken, you picked this boy up from that minstrel. You thought you were the one doing a favor to him when you forced him here, but he has done more for you than you could have imagined. So, the question becomes, how do you reward his selfless behavior?”

For a moment, based on my experience with the romantic woman, I’m sure she considered whether the boy could be brought into the family. Vassermark had hardly any upward mobility between the classes of people, but a strong enough stigmata, such as his, could have been justification enough, like bringing a new stallion into the horse herd. With a story such as those bandits, there might have been a possibility if the family was larger, but none of the Ashe sisters had been particularly fertile and the girls before her would need noble husbands. She asked, “What would you like as a reward?”

Right there, in the middle of the Ashe family palace, lords of the economic breadbasket of Vassermark, with them indebted to his bravery and with both girls near smitten with him, young Lucius answered, “I want a sword, and I want to leave.”

“Oh my goddess, I can imagine her face. I’ve never seen this Ruby, but I can see her face so clearly I could cry,” Aisha said, wiping a tear from her eye. The two of them sat with their backs to the railing along the prow. The sun had set and the moon shone overhead. It muted the colors of the world, and hid the old embarrassment cropping up in Lucius’ cheeks.

“She took it politely… although Master Amurabi is reasonably certain the dates line up and her first born was conceived by apology sex. Jacque was the one who put that idea in my head.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, slumping over and resting her head on his shoulder.

Lucius tensed. “What for?”

“For making you dredge these memories up. I’ve barely told you anything about myself, and I’ve got you just going on, and on to keep my mind off… well, to keep me occupied.”

“It’s fine, Aisha. It’s going to be a very long time before I can talk about this again, if ever. I’m being cut off from my past. I’m worried that before long, I will have forgotten it all.”

“Lucius, you’re like a horse charging to the top of a mountain, while I’m just trying to drag my cart with my own two feet, and now I’ve hitched myself to you.” Her words were slow, her eyes almost closed.

The boy cleared his throat, all too aware of the soft pressure of her body against his. “I think you’ve ended up drunk, because that doesn’t make sense. No wonder with what little food they gave us.” He turned his attention to the back of the ship, to where Captain Bodin had the wheel, his eyes aglow with the light of the moon. He stood with his back to the burning oil incense trailing behind the ship, making subtle turns through the waves. Somewhere beyond, the pirate ship must have thrown anchor lest they run afoul of hidden rocks.

For a moment, the world was at quiet peace. Weak wind, brushing waves, the creak of ropes. The deck bobbed slowly and rhythmically, lulling the both of them as dormant fatigue blanketed them. They each had the kind of spiritual innervation that took more than a few days to cure, and which would join them unannounced.

Then the pressure alongside Lucius’ body relented. He opened his eye, blinked away the almost-dream. Realization struck like lightning. The push against his back. The scrape of cloth on cloth. The bump of wood. He spun, throwing one hand then the next to grab hold of her, but it was too late. His fingers grasped nothing but the hem of her dress. The ripping of cloth cried out in the night even before Aisha’s scream.

Then she hit the water. She bobbed up once, a flash of red in the night. Then the tides washed over her.

“Throw a rope!” Lucius screamed while the sailors rushed over, but they were sea sailors. He didn’t trust any of them to know how to swim. Better to drown than to survive long enough to be eaten, that was the motto of sea sailors. Lucius put a foot on the railing and leapt. Over the side he went, and down to the water after her.