Day 9, 10:00 AM

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

— James Cameron

I’m still a bodyguard, my Select Principal now shows selected. As far as I can tell, there’s no difference in how my class works, regardless of whether I have a principal. After leaving Lea with her guards, my Select Principal showed [none], and the only difference I noticed was that I can’t level up without someone to protect.

As for leveling up by taking an arrow for Manuella, I’d do it even without the bonus, I just hope there’s no need, and I stay stuck at level four forever.

Generally, I am happy. Happier than I have been in a long while. The air is fresh, the clear, unobstructed sunshine bathes the paved road, contrasted by the shaded forest which flanks it from both sides. Manuella and I started jogging as soon as we lost sight of the walls.

The run is easy for me. We have thirty-five miles to cover today, preferably in six to seven hours, so we can buy a boat. If we arrive too late, we lose the extra day’s advantage, something I’m really keen on keeping when pursued.

Manuella’s the problem. Her stamina is horrible. She spent years without taking longer walks, and laying most of the time. Five minutes in, she’s already breathing hard, and as time trickles by she’s inching closer and closer to panting.

“Stop,” I say, and she stops.

“Come here. I’ll carry you.”

She opens her mouth, probably to argue, but I don’t want to waste time. “Time is of the essence. At your pace, you will take ten hours to reach Habmir. That’s well past dark, and we would have to spend the night in the inn, instead of on a boat, drifting downstream.”

She purses her lips and nods. I pick her up, and now that I don’t have adrenaline coursing through me, I notice she’s heavy.

It makes sense, she’s six feet tall.

Heavier than expected or not doesn’t matter. I start running, my jog a good deal faster now that I don’t have to mind her pace.

Four hours later, she’s shaken, and I’m sweaty, but we’ve come far.

The roadside stone informs me I traveled thirty miles, meaning I ran a marathon and then some, princess-carrying a woman. I think ironmen participants back home could do better without the extra load, but with the added weight, I’m pretty certain I just casually beat every single man on Earth.

“We can walk the rest of the way.” I put her down, breathing hard, but I’m still doing better than she did after ten minutes of trot.

“Good thinking, telling people along the way you broke your leg.” I compliment her, and she nods.

“Can you walk?” She asks, and I nod. My feet are blistered, but it’s nothing compared to open wounds I suffered while sprinting through uneven forest terrain.

“I can keep carrying you, if you want. But we should make it in two hours of relaxed walking.”

“No, thank you. You have done enough.” She smiles politely, and we continue our journey.

Now that I’m free of my load, and that I don’t have to focus, looking at the flagstones so that we don’t trip, I can relax. The birds are chirping, the same bastards which happily sang in the forest while we ran for our lives.

“I’m Aang, by the way.” I realize I haven’t introduced myself this time round. Funny thing, the misperception of knowing her almost ruined the most fundamental moment of human etiquette.

“My name is Manuella Eagleeye, pleasure to meet you, Aang.” I think she said the exact same thing the first time, but she’s not disgusted by leeches or whatever it was that disgusted her back then.

“Do you mind if I ask a question?” she continues, and I smile.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I have been thinking. Do you really not mind marrying a slave prostitute, do you not find me revolting—”

I don’t let her walk down the path of self-loathing.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“That was some prostitute they called Duchess. I’m traveling with Manuella Eagleeye, the one and only daughter of Duke Eagleeye. A maiden whose honor and good name I will protect.” My voice is between serious and joking, but then I look at her and turn dead serious. “If anyone dares defame you or defile you in any way, I will crush them with my bare hands.”

She nods. Lea would have blushed, her mouth ajar, but all Manuella deigns me is a cold nod.

“Hurry up, you’re slacking,” I say, since there’s no mood worth spoiling.

We travel in silence for an hour, before I grow too bored with the silence, and the chirping birds, and the fresh air.

I glance at Manuella, her face is red, and sweat is pouring down her cheeks.

“Are you all right? Can you walk? Do you want me to carry you?”

She shakes her head.

“If you want to talk, or have any questions, just ask. I’ll do my best to answer.”

She gives me an ‘are you insane, I’m dying over here’ look, and I take the hint.

We reach Habmir half an hour later without incident. The sun is still high in the sky, and I leave Manuella at a roadside inn to catch her breath and grab a meal, before going to the river dock to ask about rowboats.

“What do you mean five gold crowns? Are you insane? Look, these boards are rotting. They’ll shatter if I kick them. If you want that kind of money, you have to fix it up first! Ten shields!” I barter with the man selling the lousiest little boat I found, and he’s still asking for an arm and a leg.

I buy the boat for twenty-seven shields, then treat the old fisherman something like grog while Manuella dissects me with her eyes.

“Say, anyone here selling a mut?” I ask the old man, and he nods.

“I’ll give you one for three shields.” I eye him and give him a crooked smile.

“Old man, you’re either giving the dog to me, or selling it for three shields! Nah, nah, fine. I won’t barter, you can go back home with the thirty silver shields you wanted. Don’t you ever say I was cheap.”

“You ate my liver with how hard you haggled!” he shouts, and we clack our wooden mugs and laugh.

“Are you cousins? Do you know each other?” Manuella asks, and the old man replies while I’m still gulping down my vile liquor.

“Never met this thief before, and if you’ve got half a brain, you won’t do business with him, lad. He’ll rob you blind, have a drink with you, and pretend he’s your friend.”

I side-eye him. “Do you really want me to haggle for that dog?”

The old man shudders.

“He ain’t as bad as he seems,” he says, and I chuckle, while Manuella just nods, looking at me like a hawk.

An hour later, we’re rowing down the river. Well, I’m rowing, Manuella is scratching the three silver’s worth of fleas with extremely perfumed hands. The poor mut shakes his head, but the bribe of fish guts the old man gave us for free is good enough for now.

The food stinks almost as bad as the dog, and even if I didn’t plan to, I would sink this boat as soon as we reach the fabled Namir.

“You can swim, right?” I ask, despite knowing the answer. “I just assumed…”

“I can swim well enough. Do not worry, I would have told you about such an obvious flaw in your plan.”

“Our plan,” I say. “You said a dog would work better than a goat.”

She nods. “The goat is too conspicuous and expensive. There’s no need to waste your limited finances on food for the wild beasts.”

“Our limited finances,” I correct her, and she nods.

“I gave you half the money, half the food. I’m carrying the spare equipment, but that’s only because I’m stronger. And my offer still stands, if you want to ask me anything, you can.”

She bites immediately. “How can you not know how old you are? You should at least know how many summers you have seen.”

“That’s a long story, mostly boring. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

She nods, and I recount what happened in the last week or so in several sentences.

“That was a very short story,” she says. “So, you are the mysterious knight who saved the viscount’s daughter, and in reality you were their former slave, whom she failed to recognize.”

I nod. “Bandits I interrogated said I was a porter with the caravan. From my current point of view, I must say they are blind to talent. They had me waste away for god knows how many years, I say god knows, since I have no clue.”

“You do not sound like a slave when you speak,” she says and I shrug.

“Maybe bandits beat some brains into my head by mistake while bashing them out of other heads. I don’t know. I can only tell you what happened. Maybe I was a knight in disguise, maybe I was a genius forced into slavery, I really, really have no idea what had happened before I woke up and started killing bandits with sticks and bare hands.”

“How did you hear about me, then?” she asks, and my balls shrivel.

She’s so eerily intelligent. She busted me with two questions. If what I said is true, how the hell did I learn about her? The worst thing is, I’m telling the truth, and she still found a loophole.

While terrified, I still don’t skip a beat.

“I heard someone mention a…” Mind your tongue. “Prostitute who escaped several times. Then I asked around while gathering everything I thought I would need for my escape, and collected information. Duchess was very famous.”

Thank you intellect! I will invest every single point in you from now on!

I can’t believe the piece of mental gymnastic my brain just pulled, and again I said mostly the truth. In fact, you can even think it as entirely true, since I did hear Manuella talking about herself, and I asked her about some things while planning our escape.

She slowly nods. “You learned about my circumstances and found me in an afternoon? You are really fast and decisive.”

“Actually, I started around ten in the morning, and I’m a people person, so getting information wasn’t all that hard.”

She nods absentmindedly. I hope she’s thinking of the old fisherman, whose name I hadn’t caught. I didn’t give mine, since we’re on the run, and he didn’t give his, probably so I don’t know who I’m looking for after the shabby boat sinks on me.