Through the fields of clouds above, summer warmed the shallows of the Misty Isles. A score of islands had been sheared of their jungle, the trees uprooted and the soil tilled. Men from Vassermark and from Giordana, even a few distant travelers from Skaldheim, squabbled about land contracts and crop prices. They shoved bales of tobacco against sacks of grain. Wet markets chopped down the huts and homes at their borders so the warehouses of agricultural industry could spring up like the edible caps of fungi.

For a time, there had been a fear among the intelligentsia of the land that prices would spiral out of control, that the glut of gold would lead to the stripping bare of the locals by merchants. Careful minting and diluting of so-called electrum allowed the secret stockpiling of personal gold in a scheme I shant document lest someone repeat it. Suffice to say, it required my personal attention to turn money into more money. As a warning to any who might take inspiration from my actions, a proper investigation would have turned up the ruse and had the crown’s best interrogators beating our doors down. The only reason I could safely do it was because the crown had more pressing matters at the time and soon enough the records would be burned.

Under such considerations, it was practically my duty as a member of the government–de facto–to strip the merchant class of their ill-gotten wealth and put it to proper use. Everything was going splendidly.

Due to this utter lack of problem, Lucius saw fit to invent problems for himself. To conjure them up in his mind because he had the devil of boredom in him. Miss Lynnfield enjoyed sparring with him, but such exercise couldn't even occupy the space of time between dawn and luncheon. Governance had been setup to function even after the king inevitably removed him, no matter how incompetent a replacement, so his time before dinner could scarcely be filled with patrolling town to inspect the new projects, the coming and going of the guards and ships, and meeting with the various applicants and supplicants.

To speak of his evenings would almost be a disgrace. One would think that he would be in the honeymoon lust of besottment with Aisha, or perhaps showing his virility by claiming Kajsa as his own too. The women would have been open to his advances. Instead, he wasted his days and nights in the company of a handful of oddities he plucked out of the various caravans.

One of them I do not fault in the slightest, for the man–his overwrought tattoos aside–had a stigmata which allowed him to harden clay as though in a kiln’s furnace but only at his touch. It came out with a spectacular gloss finish whenever he finished sculpting something, and many of his works are available to this day. Perhaps you’ve seen his works in the Mars University? Some chapels may still hide his figures but modern sensibilities find them rather lewd.

I would have liked to stab the tune-deaf bard he kept around the way one trains a sea gull with bread crumbs. Oh, I can still remember that dull verse he kept repeating and looping. He had the most absurd rhymes and repetitions as he tried to work in random events. As I stomped through their grotto abode to find my pupil, I believe he rhymed “Harsh man of the robe,” with “go home, he crowed.” Off and feminine if I ever heard a rhyme. To this day, I prefer the meter of my own people. At least Aisha’s voice was pleasant.

“This is no way for a nobleman to look,” I told my pupil, who had barely lifted his head to squint at me from the sandy shoal he had turned to an aquatic park thanks to his sculptor friend. We were on the south side of the island, where the locals still refused to tread for that was near Umbra’s lair. Seclusion gave safety, and thus I found him lounging in shaded water, as naked as a babe.

“Should I be dressed right now?” He gestured at the water, a warping blanket of azure that made his paleness dance.

I told him, “I’ve seen you naked more than enough. What I’m offended by is your laziness.”

“There’s nothing to do,” he complained, settling deeper into the soft sands of the beach, and his sycophant bard echoed in verse. “Just let me enjoy some rest, will you? There will be trouble soon enough.”

“That there is trouble to come is why you should do what needs be done!” It galls me that the bard applauded me for that line. “Come now, the prince has started his war in the middle. They’ll come for you as soon as a ship can get here.”

He tried to wave me off, salt water flicking from his fingers. “I will respond appropriately when they get here. You tell me there’s someone to fight, a demon to kill, or a city to capture, and I’m there. Just don’t ask me to do more paperwork.”

I felt quite the school master as I planted my withered old fingers on my hips and glared down at the boy. “Is this how you’ll behave when you have a city you mean to keep?”

“No, of course not. But why should I make my enemy’s lives easier?”

The sculptor scrolled out from the rest abode, a stone hovel of shade he constructed, to say, “He’s just getting around to the fact that he has something for you to do.”

I glared at him, but he was too drunk to care. Lucius rolled over on his side to face me as I said, “Indeed, we won’t be on the Isles much longer, so I figure we have given Golden more than enough time to digest. It’s time to put him to work again. We’ve certainly paid him enough.”

I think he had been suppressing a fear that I meant to kill his friend to keep her shut and quiet. I have myself to blame on this front. It was the obvious solution in a simple sense, and I had been known to opt for elegance. This monumental fear had occluded from him what a simple matter it was to put a binding oath on someone. We had done it to the doctor, hadn’t we? It was just a matter of magic, so long as the parties entered into the contract in good faith. Shackling someone with an oath is a much harder to do and there’s a quite wonderful tale of a Green Knight breaking such an oath through sheer manly fortitude,, but I invite the reader to find that on their own time. It is a matter of myth, not of historical fact, so I must omit it here.

His realization so gripped him that he rose straight out of the grotto in the nude and I fear would have gone running back to the manor without even putting a tunic on. The sight at least confirmed for me that his excess drinking had done no harm to his physical fitness, but one scowl from me had his head down. He fetched his clothes and for a moment, we stood beneath a pergola of vines that looked somewhat like grape but were entirely inedible. One of the artistic troubadours he had picked up thought they looked like acanthus, but was mistaken. It gave us a middling of shade and a muffle around our voices. With my shoulder against one of the faux-marble pillars, I asked, “You do understand the political future of your love life, don’t you?”

He stared at his belt buckle, fastening and refastening it. “Of course. You were never shy about encouraging me to sow my seed far and wide as soon as I became a man.”

“But that doesn’t mean to disregard where you put it.”

“You saying I should have pulled out better?”

“I would rather you embrace the fact that you didn’t. With luck, your progeny will have the same gift as you. Just think of the royal line. Now that’s what I call divine right.”

He sat down upon a wooden bench, dusting the sand off his feet before lacing sandals back on. He glared at me. “You know as well as I–” Indeed, I knew better. “That stigmata aren’t hereditary. If they were, nobles would snatch up people like me and adopt them left and right.”

I stroked my beard and nodded. “There are things your master knows that he has not told you, boy. The blessing of the gods is about as close as one can get to measuring destiny and your destiny will surely entangle with that of your children. The winds may blow, but you are the mainsail upon the ship. How you face, the rest will bend.”

“A ship can only have one mainsail, and if all your rigging is afoul of one another… you’ll have some very confused sailors.”

“Don’t examine an analogy too deeply. You’ll ruin it without fail. Would you like the more tedious explanation?”

“No.”

“Then allow me my analogies.”

“We should get the bird.”

I huffed and crossed my arms. “We shall have to find him. He has made a home of that temple.”

Lucius laughed. “He’s made a home of this garden. Well, the cellar at least.”

My pupil guided me over to the carved out storage room. It was too crude to be called a complex. They had dug precisely enough for the barrels to be chilled and no more. Why they bothered, I’m not sure. There was no wine left in them. Most of which, I surmised, had gone down the throat of what had been a respectable emissary of the gods.

Once the respected speaker of the Shepherd, the plumage in the crown of the temples, a being of age and wisdom and decadence for whom muses doted upon. I found him curled up in his own filth, reeking of wine. His white shirt had nearly been blackened by stains and he did not budge at our approach.

“Throw him in the water.”

And so, Lucius got the help of his bard friend, and the two of them tossed an even more pathetic pile of flesh and failure into the sea. He burst back out from the sapphire waves, whipping his hair out of his face and spitting the salt from his mouth. He spun about, eyes shut from the stinging brine. Before he said something, he realized I was the one standing near him. He planted his hands on his hips, spat some hair from his lips, and addressed me, “What do you want, wizard?”

“An oath,” I said.

“The girl’s?”

And so, I marched two wet fools back to the manor. They were accosted by flies almost the entire way back and I was accosted by their musing about burning the jungles away to get rid of the flies. The three of us were greeted by the mundane, the guards and the busy scribes, the little people who were that much more productive for a smidge of attention. The business of life didn’t stop just because there was an event afoot; particularly an event we didn’t advertise.

I had already summoned Kajsa under false pretenses and we met her in the basement of the Aliston governor’s manor. The stone walls were cool, and the oil lamp warm upon her skin. I watched as her smile lit up at the sight of Lucius, then waver at the sight of me. “What’s going on?” the young alchemist asked.

Lucius glanced back at Golden and myself. I said, “We’re all in the know.”

She straightened her back. “About?”

“Where I was born,” Lucius said, and sat down upon the table before the couch. The basement made for a rather intimate foyer, well insulated for privacy of multiple sorts. As he gave Kajsa the short explanation of who I was and why that mattered–she already knew I was the wizard from Jarnmark so many years ago–Golden filched the last of her dinner to staunch his growing hangover.

When he grew bored of the two almost-lovers, he clapped his dirty hands together and said, “Well then, what kind of oath will it be?”

She tilted her head and bit her lip. “What do you mean?”

The angel stood between them and shrugged. “Well, I could marry you two. Would be rather more binding than most vows.”

Lucius cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

“Indeed,” I added. “No marriage.”

Golden was unfazed. “There are other skills. I actually quite fancy this bit of magic I picked up from Umbra. I can weave a masterful–and permanent–enamoring. Eternal lust sounds pleasant for you, doesn’t it? You’d be wholly unable to betray him.”

The girl’s face went red. “Excuse me.”

Lucius shook his head. “That’s a terrible idea.”

The girl jumped to her feet, still not even to Golden’s shoulders. “I’ll have you know I’m the only person on this entire island who can operate the refinement factory!” I did not correct her on the matter, as I would be leaving soon enough.

I cleared my throat. “Stop trying to play with your toys. The only oath she needs to take is one to never speak of her past with Lucius. Never to utter his birth name or any other fact of their childhood.”

Lucius caught a hint of what that would entail. “That’s different from what Sammy and Aisha swore.”

“And look where that got us,” I said. “Or do you mean to take her as your second wife? Wouldn’t that violate her vows to Sapphira?”

Kajsa shook her head. “I’m fine with the oath of silence.”

Lucius took her by the hand and bid her sit back down. “Are you sure?”

“It’s fine. You shouldn’t have told me anyway. I don’t want to be your downfall by mistake. We are friends after all, right?”

“I should have sent you back home with a purse of gold and never spoken to you again. This is my mistake.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve given me freedom like I could never have dreamed of here. I couldn’t be happier and I would hate myself if my loose tongue ruined everything.”

Golden yawned, more for the noise than for breath. “Right then, where do you want the mark? The oath will imprint itself on you. I suppose technically, you will be able to break the oath if you lose that body part so… I could put it around your throat but I believe that’s a marriage custom?” Amulets were a fashionable choice, not collars.

“It will be a ring?” Kajsa asked, hesitation apparent on her face.

The angel nodded. “Want it on a finger? The magic might require more than one in that case.”

Lucius shook his head. “Put it out of sight, would you?”

Kajsa said, “If it must be a ring upon me, put it around my wrist.”

“Sure, why not,” Golden said and clasped his hands around her proffered wrist. “Do you hereby consent to the sealing of your knowledge? That you may never betray the man across from you?”

Lucius furrowed his brow, but before he could open his mouth to question the angel, Kajsa said, “Certainly.”

“Hold on,” he said, grabbing the angel’s wrist and prying it off but the mark had been made. “What was that phrasing?”

Golden shrugged and walked off. “I kept it simple,” he said, and made to leave the basement.

Lucius jumped to his feet then spun back to face Kajsa. “Has it already happened?” A foolish question to be sure.

“Allow me,” I said. “You there, alchemist. What is the name of the man across from you?”

She had settled back into her seat and I could see the confused blinking of someone whose memories were muddled. It was a dream like apparition of confusion. “He is my employer, Lucius von Solhart.”

“Does he have any other name?”

She frowned. “What, like a nickname?”

That was the first time my pupil considered killing me.