On our return from the temple of Lumius, the mountain pass took us along a particular cliff that overlooked much of Jarnmark. Butchering the godling had taken me much of the previous day, and to Ezra’s despair, we had to spend an additional night in the woods, so it was early morning as we trekked the mountains with the goats.

“Come on now, before the dragons warm up for the day. That hand cannon isn’t going to do much against a dragon,” I said, striding on ahead of the kids.

“You’re going to get me a big bed, right? A goose feather bed. Extra soft,” Ezra said, stumbling along behind me. Her mind drifted with the clouds, imagining what pleasures of civilization awaited her at the city. That was well enough, for it kept the weight of her mind off her shoulders, and thus the hike easier.

Lucius was the quiet one, because every step we took was a step back to humanity. It was back towards his parents who had sold him off. It was to Master Wilhelm how tossed him aside to curry favor. It was to the Ashe family who didn’t even see him as human. All the things he had turned his back on, and now he carried the knowledge that he had failed to do even that. He had not survived on his own, only by clinging onto me.

“Oh, yes, a very large bed. The largest.”

“Really?” Ezra asked.

“No, of course not. You’re a child. I would never take you there and debauch you like that.”

Ezra’s brow furrowed together as she tried to understand what I meant, but she was only just beginning puberty and had no true conception of what a brothel was. I didn’t explain to her why such an establishment would have the best beds in the city, even better than the Ashe family’s own. “But, the bath at least…”

“Oh, yes, we’ll have the day at the bath. You’ll have to scrub down until you smell like a blue blood.”

“What’s a blue blood?”

“An outdated term.”

“But, what is–”

“Come on now, we can set our way by the smoke stacks. Even better than these meandering logging roads. Look, smelters all through the valley. Someone must have found a good vein here. Maybe something better than iron.”

Ezra sighed and moved on with the conversation. “What? Like silver?”

“Like wolfram, but that comes from tin mines, not iron, and Vassermark is rather deprived of tin for now. At the least, they have lead… so long as I can keep them from using it in their drinking water.”

“Why would you drink lead? Does it taste good?”

“Quite the opposite, it tastes like stupidity.”

That broke Ezra’s grasp. She was too tired from the hike up and down the mountain to think about deep subjects and wordplay. It was just as well that her mind flew away, back to dreaming of a soft bed, because I turned my attention to the young Lucius. He hadn’t spoken at all, and it was clear that he was ruminating rather than planning. When I found a suitable edge, a sheer drop beside the road as though we lorded over the land from a king’s balcony, I stopped.

“Lucius, was this trip the furthest you’ve ever been from where you were born?”

Ezra wasted no time in dropping her rear upon a stone and resting, but the boy shuffled near me and worked up an answer. “Yes, sir. I think so.”

“So you’ve never been across the sea?”

“No. I wanted to go, though. Cost too much money.”

“Ah, money. Always an issue and irksome enough to make you want to fabricate it. Regardless, I have enough to take us across the world. You’d like that, yes?”

He glanced over his shoulder, to where the scraggly trees still hinted at a forest. “To do more of that?”

“At times, yes. More often, it is to find certain people. I assure you, this was the exception to my activities. I’m a scholar, not a fighter.”

“Seemed to me like you were pretty good at fighting.”

“I have some tricks, but I am nothing compared to the true masters of the martial arts. I’d like to introduce you to some of them. I think your stigmata gives you a great predisposition for it.”

He frowned and looked at his feet. “How am I supposed to fight with only one arm?”

“You’d be surprised. Most fighting is done with the mind. It’s all about understanding your weapon, your body, what you can do and what they can do. If you have a grasp of those things, then it’s just a matter of taking the proper actions with a firm spirit and cutting your foe down.”

“But I can’t hold a sword.”

“Would you like to be able to?”

He perked up. “Can you give me my arm back?”

I grinned. “Me? No, you’ll have to get that back yourself. But, I can help the process.”

“Then help me!”

“I will, I will, but such help would make you quite indebted to me, don’t you think?”

“I’ll work it off,” he promised, resolutely nodding and squaring off against me to show his determination. Of course, I’ve never met a child who properly understood what taking on a multiple year obligation meant; but, in this case I was happy to take advantage of him.

“Well, I’ll have to take your word on that. For now, you shall be my youngest pupil.” I held out my hand, clasped it around Lucius’ and shook it. It pumped him full of hope and new vigor. His face beamed with the idea of being whole once more. The intoxicating allure of health, wealth, knowledge, and power. By taking hold of my hand, he was grabbing onto a future where anything could be in his grasp.

Then I threw him off the cliff.

At first, he didn’t even understand what had happened. He stared up at me. He swung his arm and kicked his legs. Then the wind really started to pick up, howling past his ears and thrashing his ruddy clothes. His stomach leapt inside him and he screamed. Wordless, fearful noise burst from his lips and vanished into the wind. He tumbled through the air. His feet caught jutting rocks, bouncing him off. He caught a glimpse of Ezra peering over the side, in as much shock as he was.

Then one of his spins cracked his head against the slab. That dulled his thoughts and stopped the screaming. A moment later, he hit the base. Flat upon the stone, not even the cushion of needles and dirt. The impact passed through him, liquifying his insides such that he didn’t even bounce. There was no sensation of pain, the trauma was too abrupt to process pain. One moment he was falling, the next his blood no longer flowed inside his skin, but outside it.

Then his stigmata began putting him back together.

Like driftwood, Lucius had floated from the ships and washed up across an exposed rock. A whole forest of the obsidian spires speckled the sea there, like a geological city sunk beneath the waves. THe stone had pulled him from the current like a gold paneer’s sieve, and enabled me to find him there.

As he experienced it, there was a burning in his body, a sticking pain through his ribs. When he tried to haul himself up, his back muscles seized and twitched. Memory of hours past returned, not quite lost. The sun crept up from the horizon, giving some warmth to his body that had been soaking in the sea. Enough to make his clammy fingers bend again as he reached back and took hold of the barbed arrow.

He yanked it out and got only the shaft. The tip remained lodged against his ribs.

“Fuck. That’s not good,” he mumbled, before strength faded. Blood drooled from his wound and into the water, pulling him to a half-conscious drift. He thought about the past, stirred on by all the stories he had told Aisha. The difference between memory and waking deteriorated as his stigmata sealed his wounds and made blood from sea water.

What drew him back to the flesh and blood, the there and then, was a gull picking at his stubble beard. The beak poking and biting at his chin. He snatched it by the neck, causing a flurry of squawks and flapping of wings. The gull scratched him with its legs until he lifted it up and glared at it. He groaned and narrowed his eyes. “You’d better be Master’s,” he said, and chucked the bird back into the sea. It tumbled and splashed into the water before bobbing back up.

Lucius grunted and set his head back down, lacking the strength to pick it up, nor the motivation to.

The creature tucked its wings, strutting across the water like nothing wrong had happened. It preened itself a moment, undoing the ruffled feathers and side-eying him. All ingrained behavior, the kind of underlying programming that a good spell took advantage of. Soon enough, it spread its wings and took off, flying away to find the Sea Bird’s Rest once more and report in.