Not for the first time in his life, Lucius found himself tied bodily to the mast of a ship which had no brig. One of the spare rigging lines had been looped around him until he seemed to wear more hemp than wool. That made him the most dressed person aboard the entire vessel. The sailors around him wore nothing but pants akin to the hanma style, tight around their midsections but open and loose down to their ankles. I have my suspicions about their ability to dry off after a spray, but it was their custom, and let them climb rigging well enough.

The second most dressed person on the ship was either the woman aboard, for she had a strap of cloth across her chest at the least, or the captain who had a gold threaded vest on. The sun had colored all of their skins bronze from southern heat, which did them little good as the temperature steadily dropped on the journey north.

While I had managed to teach Lucius a few languages, Aillesgo was not one of them, and the lyrical chatter between the woman and the captain went straight over Lucius’ head until the vested man squatted down and knocked him on the head with a cane to get his attention.

“Were you the fighter?” The captain’s speech was thick with accent, several of his phonemes entirely wrong, but close enough to be understood.

“Shouldn’t you ask if I’m nobility?” Lucius responded, squinting up at the man. His missing eye was itching, burning with the salt water as his stigmata instigated it to heal.

“Are you?”

“Which answer keeps you from killing me?”

The captain grinned and laughed. “I like you. Were you the one who fought the snake?”

Lucius shifted, tried to get some better breathing room in his bindings. “Why do you think that? I ended up overboard is all.”

“I think that because you weren’t grateful to be saved. You were too calm. I think you meant to go overboard. You’ve got a blessing from the goddesses too,” the captain said, jabbing Lucius in the chest.

“What of it?”

The woman stepped over, her head blocking the sun. She was older than Lucius, and had a healthier shape to her body, one that said she ate well and lived well. It let him easily imagine how she kept the captain’s favor, but his only inkling of her duty on the ship was the golden charms woven through her hair. “What’s it do?”

“Makes me float.”

“Liar,” the woman said.

“And so what if I am?”

The captain grabbed him by the chin and tilted his head around. “How’d you lose the eye?”

“In a duel.”

“For honor?”

“You could say it was for his sister.”

“Ah, so sad she’s not here.”

Aisha was almost close enough to see them, but entirely unable to help. Lucius pulled his chin free and asked, “What are you people doing this far north anyway?”

“Fishing.” Half the crew of the ship laughed, even the ones scraping the deck clean. “And look, I caught a vassish man.”

The woman leaned down, putting her hands on her knees and letting her chest dangle in front of Lucius. He at last couldn’t ignore it, and only then saw the stigmata she had engraved across her skin. It was complicated, the forgotten runes twisted around themselves again and again. Though he couldn’t read enough of it to be certain, he recognized it as a weather manipulation ability. “Do you value your life?” she asked.

“Are you offering it back to me?”

“For a price.”

“Every man has a price.”

She grinned and put her hand on his head, gently squeezing until she had a fistful of his hair. “Become mine… my thrall.”

Lucius stopped himself at the last moment from spitting in her face. He had to swallow it before he could say, “Why don’t you let me think about it? I’ve lost too much blood.”

“It’s not a bad gig. We’d just have to put you in iron. You know how to sail?”

He forced his sneer to become a grin. “Not really. I’m more a fighter than a sailor.”

“Mercenaries are fine too. Minato, get some good in him please,” the woman said, standing back up and strolling past him.

To Lucius’ surprise, the captain obeyed. The man barked orders in his foreign tongue, and some of the idle sailors ran to comply. He scrutinized them anew, spotting bracelets and anklets on most of the sailors, but he couldn’t spot any kind of hierarchy among them and the un-cuffed. Eventually, one emerged from below deck. He had a bowl of boiled rice, still wet and crunchy, in one hand, and a jug of something alcoholic in the other. I hesitate to call it sake, though it was fermented from rice. To do so would insult a great many brewers. To put it lightly, the pirates did not offer him their best rations, nor did they feed him or untie him.

They left it sitting in front of him, getting cold and soggy, and yet still appetizing enough that his empty stomach wanted it. Hours passed as he indignantly tried to not look at it, getting chuckles from the crew as they casually continued their pursuit of the Sea Bird’s Rest. After the sun reached its apex, the woman returned to him and sat cross-legged in front of him.

“Have you thought over my offer?”

“Plenty,” he said, and looked away from her. The first thing that caught his eye was a gull, standing peculiarly on the ship railing and looking back at him. It didn’t flutter up when a sailor passed by, or even flinch. It looked like a puppet, which is precisely what it was. My puppet. Lucius cleared his throat quickly and turned back to the woman. “So why are you negotiating with me instead of the captain?”

She smirked and teetered the liquor bottle with a finger. “I’m better at languages than Minato. He’s busy with the chase too. You Vassish take such strange routes through the waters.”

Lucius tried to shrug, as much as the rope would allow. “The water is deeper here. Bigger threats. I hear the seas east of Giordana are shallow, they can nearly be waded.”

“At low tide, yes, if you don’t mind the coral. The weather is much better too.”

“The weather was fine here, until you changed it unless I’m mistaken.”

She laughed. “And what makes you think that?”

“Your stigmata.”

“My stigmata only lets me know what storms are coming.”

“Liar.”

She smirked. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve seen that stigmata before. It doesn’t have half the complexity, and it certainly wouldn’t give you this much authority.”

The woman licked her lips. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re worth more than an oarsman. Too bad for you that my offering price isn’t going up.”

“What price are you offering? A full stomach?”

“Your life.”

Lucius snorted. “Sparing my life to enslave me is no benefit to me. I’d rather you slit my throat and tossed me overboard.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t so lucky.

“True, but it won’t be your whole life, just the next five to ten years. You’re young. You’d do well as a sailor, mercenary…”

“Pirate,” he finished.

She grinned, giving a distinctly feline impression. “We’ve a… how would you Vassish call it? A letter of mark.”

“So that makes it all better, does it?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“It just means your nobles gave you forgiveness ahead of time to be evil.”

Her smile vanished. She stood up and kicked over the liquor bottle. Its contents splashed out, gurgling over the deck as she looked down at him. “You think you’ll be rescued if you buy time, don’t you?”

“Won’t I? How could you blame me for such a wish?”

Out from a pocket of her pants came a knife. A slender thing the size of her little finger and sharp enough she could have shaved him. She leaned down and put the edge to his lip, letting him taste the warm steel. “You know, an oarsman doesn’t need his tongue to do his work.”

He pressed his head back, hard against the mast of the ship. It didn’t get him away from her carving blade. “That’d be your loss.”

“Not hearing you anymore?”

“Having me as an oarsman.”

“As opposed to what? You’re not pretty enough to be a bed slave.”

“From the looks of it, I’m the only other person on this ship with a stigmata. You should be spoon feeding me and begging me to tell you what it is–” he shrank back again as she pressed the tip past his lips, prodding it beyond his teeth. “I won’t be able to tell you if you cut my tongue out!”

She scowled at him and pulled the knife from his mouth. “Illiterate pig. How about I let you starve as we chase down your friends and kill them?”

Lucius licked the blood from his lips. It did nothing but put the taste of iron in his mouth. The slice kept dripping blood. “Can you even catch them?”

“Of course we can. Their mast broke last night,” the woman said as she vanished the knife back into her pocket. “Hold tight, we’ll have a whole line of you soon enough, and we don’t need all of you as slaves.” She walked off after that without saying anything more, but she had said enough.

All the while, my avian puppet had stood and listened. Once it was disturbed and forced to fly to the other side of the ship, but it soaked in the memory of the conversation and afterwards departed. With a few flaps and soars, it left the pirate ship and returned to the Sea Bird’s Rest, where I extracted the information from it, and began developing a counter strategy. The whole affair left me in a mix of relief and despair, to know that the storm was not divine in origin but to have also been forced into using some of my magic. It would leave traces behind, traces that could be studied and deduced from. I had no choice in the matter, unless I wanted to delay all my plans until I found a replacement for Lucius entirely, and I had already invested a decade into the boy.

Meanwhile, Lucius sat aboard the pirate ship, tied firm to the mast. He listened to their foreign speech, only able to appreciate some of the tunes they sang for their rhythm alone. His stomach growled empty, hungering for the congealing rice paste left before him. He didn’t break. He had starved before and found himself well acquainted with the hardship. He kept his mouth shut and got what rest he could, until that evening, when they caught up with the Sea Bird’s Rest.

No ley cannons blasted off the back of the ship to scuttle them, nor did I bombard them with magic. The defense of our vessel was remarkably mundane. As far as the local Divine Beasts were concerned.