“When you get back, could you outlaw fish?” Eloise’s strides were measured, paced to match Luce’s own. Embarrassingly, without any deliberate effort to avoid it, she’d moved far ahead of him walking normally.

Luce cracked the slightest of smiles. “Well, no. I don’t even think my father could do that. But at this point, I would if I could.” Without any life on land, options for survival had been harshly limited: the same stale water, laboriously boiled each time they made camp; the same bony fishes, when Eloise managed to catch one; otherwise the same roasted sea plants, so salty and dead they’d fit in better with the bleached husks on land. “We’ll just have to avoid it, ourselves.”

Eloise nodded glumly. “Imagine if you could, though. It’d be forbidden, pushed back to expensive smuggling and black markets, spoken of in hushed tones by so-called ‘decent’ people. We could tell them we had nothing but fresh fish for days on end, and they’d marvel at the luxury.”

“You have quite the vivid imagination. It’s not a bad thought, though.”

“Yeah.” She looked over her shoulder for a moment, then turned to face forward again. “I’ll definitely be telling absolutely everyone about this, anyway. Really covered myself in glory on this one.”

“Eh.” Luce shrugged. “You can cry yourself to sleep on a bed made of money, once the ransom comes through.”

That had been a great point of contention itself, the subject of multiple days of the sort of shouting and fighting Father and Mother had called ‘reasoned debate’. With technically potable water, bony fish, and heavily brined kelp, survival at the basest, subsistence level was possible, if in no way sustainable over the long term.

Which beget the question of where to go next. Charenton was the obvious choice, the closest city inhabited by the living, and a place where ship passage elsewhere would be relatively easy to obtain.

Eloise, however, charming damsel that she was, had objected for typically self-centered reasons.

“Sure, Charenton sounds great,” she’d said. “I was looking for a shiny set of bracelets, and steel pieces chained together suit me nicely. I’ll probably get a woven necklace to match.”

Luce had sighed loudly at that. “Charenton is its own municipality. The Crown of Avalon has no official claim to the land. It’s not a territory like Lyrion or Malin. Neutral ground.”

“Neutral?” she’d scoffed. “Charenton’s Magister serves at Avalon’s pleasure. If she defied you, you’d simply find another. Grabbing a fugitive from its cells would be trivial for your father or any of the thousand people that would see me hung for this”

“Hanged, not hung. Last I checked, you aren’t a tapestry.”

“Thank you ever-so-much for your corrections, professor. Truly, your genius knows no bounds. Tapestry or fugitive though, I wouldn’t last a second within Charenton’s walls with a prince of Avalon at my side, and you know that.” She had crossed her arms, then. “I can’t blame you for scheming to kill me, moronic ingenue that I am, but it does get rather tiresome.”

“While your incessant sarcasm never loses its appeal.”

“Thank you.” She’d bowed then, obnoxious beyond all belief. “Your survival skills are beyond reproach, obviously, and you could function amazingly on your own in this desolate waste. With that in mind, you have all the leverage in the world. Decide where we go, what we do, the manner of my execution… You hold all the cards, my prince.”

“I’m not ungrateful,” he’d forced himself to say. “I’d be dead without you. Of course, I wouldn’t be in this position in the first place if you pirates hadn’t kidnapped me.”

“Neither of us would be here if you hadn’t blown up my ship! You’d probably be home by now, whole and hale save a sum of money that’s completely trivial to you. I was even going to cut you in for the smuggling, since you were such a help.”

“How magnanimous.” He’d rolled his eyes, even though the pirate probably hadn’t been looking. “Where would you have us go, then?”

“East, obviously. The Arboreum will be glad to see me, and can take care of you accordingly.”

“I have it on good authority that they’d be just as happy to see my head paraded through the streets. Absolutely not.”

Eloise had sighed, tilting her head back in a gesture more dramatic than her usual wont. “Fine. I get it, can’t trust anyone for certain. That’s smart. But we have to go somewhere. I’m not spending another fucking night on this beach picking fish bones from my teeth. The Arboreum is out? Fine. We can go to Micheltaigne. Villeneuve. Shit, even the Winter Court would probably treat me fairly.”

“All spirit followers. All happy to see me dead. No.”

Splitting up was a possibility, but an uncomfortable one, to say the least. It was Eloise’s flint that kept the fire burning, Eloise’s uncanny dexterity that granted them fish to survive on. She could probably beat him in a fight too, which meant that the contraption used to clean the water would be hers if it came to that.

There was a very real possibility that she would tire of this and leave him for dead, ransom be damned.

“I’m not going to have anyone arrest you in Charenton. Not in Malin either. I want to get home. I want to see my brother again, my father.” My cousins, save poor Cassia. “If you accompany me to Charenton, you have my word that I will say nothing. We can charter a ship to Malin and I can pay your damned ransom. You know, the one you lied about already negotiating so I’d do your dirty work? Then you can be on your bloody way and out of my sight forever.”

She’d wrinkled her nose at that. “And what guarantee would I have of that?”

“You have to trust me.”

She hadn’t replied to that, sending him silent scowls for the rest of the night. But the next day, Luce awoke to find her packing their meager possessions on the beach, bundling them into a load for two to carry.

“Thank you. You have my word that—”

“Shut up. This is the most pragmatic choice, that’s all. A live prince is worth far more than a dead one.”

And so they had traveled west, walking along the beach as much as they could each day before making camp, enduring the poor food and Eloise’s complaining all the while. After the initial thrill of salvation, even running the water through his machine each night was an exercise in dull repetition, no more innovation or discovery to be found in the process.

“I have enough dala for the trip to Malin,” Eloise muttered. “So there’s no need for you to reveal yourself to anyone in Charenton.”

“No need, maybe, but it would save us the fare. Probably get a faster ship too.” I was supposed to be in Malin months ago. Khali only knew what had befallen the city since.

If Father was even telling the truth.

Murky spirit visions were no basis to distrust family, but according to the pirate someone had tipped them off about his trip. Who’d even known about it, save Father?

“Well that sounds perfect then! A few days shaved off the journey is definitely worth my head!”

Luce sighed. “Fine. I won’t tell anyone who I am, if it helps you rest easier. I just want this to be over with.”

“You’re completely alone in that. I’m loving every moment of this wonderful journey.” She turned back to look at him for a second, then tore her gaze away abruptly. “Let me do the talking. Even if you aren’t trying to betray me, I don’t think you have what it takes to convincingly play a role.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

You may be right about that. Still, something about it sat ill with him. It wasn’t that Luce wanted to call the guards on her, not necessarily, although it would solve a great deal of his problems. After what had happened on the beach, it didn’t feel right to throw her to the wolves, but still…

I don’t like having to extend this much trust to a murderous pirate captain. There was always the chance of a ruse, a betrayal. Eloise herself had done little to dissuade him of that possibility, her cheeky sarcasm showing a clear willingness to screw anyone over at the drop of a hat, so long as she saw some benefit in it.

In the distance, a movement caught Luce’s eye, the glint of light from a piece of metal further west. “Hey, do you see that?”

Eloise narrowed her eyes, shading them with her hand. “Foresters, by the looks. I’ve seen their like often enough back in the western isles.”

Forresters? “What business would Perimont’s secret police have in Refuge?”

“No, foresters, with one ‘r’. Woodsmen. Can’t you see them swinging those axes?”

In fact, Luce couldn’t, but he hadn’t spent years at sea training his eyes to see into the distance either. “Oh. Those.” He frowned. “I wouldn’t have expected them this far up the coast.”

“Expected?” Eloise blinked. “Well, obviously you have no idea what they’re doing here, so there’s no reason to say why. Just try to lead me into them, get me executed. Sensible.”

Luce sighed. “It’s not a new initiative. Logging like this can help produce charcoal within our own territory, as an alternative to importing coal from mountains outside our jurisdiction. All the more so with these blighted husks; a fragment of spiritual energy still resides within them.”

“We’ve been burning spirit energy to make our fires?” Her fists clenched tightly. “Luce, I swear on my mother’s grave, if you fucking set me up to—”

“I didn’t! What we’ve gone through is nothing. It only matters at scale. Shit, if Cya had a problem with it, she knew where to find us.” He peered out at the workers in the distance, chopping through the bleached white husks. “Even for Avalon as a whole, it’s a very minor operation. The supply’s greatly limited unless someone wants to release another blight.”

Eloise turned and gave him a glare that could melt steel.

“Which no one has any intention of doing! I personally directed research away from anything similar, and I know my father would never sully his hands with something like that. It would mean war with the Arboreum, at minimum, and half the continent against us besides. Why would we? There’s nothing to gain and a great deal to lose.”

“So you say… Very innocuous, not mentioning that we might come across something like this before reaching Charenton. Really cementing your famed trustworthiness.”

“Look, I didn’t think about it. On the scale I’m used to working at, it’s really nothing. Charcoal from blighted trees is only a bit more efficient than something mined, so far as I know, and more contentious to acquire besides.” Not to mention the better energy sources I’m working on with the Nocturne Gate. “With our friendly relations with Guerron, there’s no need anyway. If things go well there, our supply might even increase.”

Eloise grabbed his wrist forcefully. “If you double-cross me here, I’ll put my sword through your fucking throat before you even have a chance to scream. If I’m to hang, I’ll at least hang with the satisfaction of knowing you couldn’t outlive me. So think very carefully about your answer to my next question: is this an ambush?”

“No!” Luce wrenched his hand away. “I didn’t think about them, honestly. I have no idea why they pushed so far in, but whatever it is has nothing to do with me.”

“Good.” Her posture relaxed slightly. “Then you should have no problem with us going around them.”

“Well…” Any woodsmen here would be working for Avalon, that was true without a doubt. The right word to the right person, and it could mean going home. Finding answers, setting things to right… “We have to get across the Rhan river, right? These people don’t live here, surely. They’ll have a way back.”

“No.” Her voice was firm. “We’ll find another way to cross. We should still be a day out from the river anyway.”

“So what’s your plan then? We can skirt around them, and then what? I doubt even you can swim the Rhan, and I certainly can’t.”

Eloise stopped walking. “Are you serious? It’s not an easy swim, I’ll grant, but when the alternative is withering in a dead land until death?”

“It’s not, though. We can probably get across by talking to these people. Just a simple request, and—”

“And I’ll be hauled away in chains. No.”

Luce snorted. “You can go, then. Walk to the Arboreum. I’ll even let you take the water jugs. Just leave me here and I’ll talk to them, secure my passage across the river. I won’t even mention you.”

“I bet you wouldn’t, even.” Eloise took a deep breath. “Are you sure you can’t swim it?”

“I’m not even convinced you can, sailor or not. The Rhan is the greatest river of the continent, and we’re right where it meets the Lyrion sea. In summer. It’ll be as wide and turbulent as it gets.” For once, studying the almanac in college was actually applying to real life.

“Ugh, fine.” The pirate scowled, her lip practically trying to escape her face. “A raft then. We could build a raft. You’re a scientist, right? And we’ve got all these hollow trees around. That could work.”

Luce rubbed the back of his neck. “Not really… Outside of thermodynamics and energy systems, I’m not really much of an engineer. I’ve studied the theoretical principles, which could have some application to the problem. It’s just like—”

“Just like when you tried to make a fire without a flint.” She sighed. “Alright, fine. We’ll approach. I will do the talking. Under no circumstances will you reveal who you are.”

I can think of a few circumstances. Still, he had to play this smart.

“Might be hard to get back, that way. If they know I’m a prince, our troubles are over. We could be in Malin within days; Charenton would throw the gates open for us with welcoming arms.”

“For you,” she spat.

“Well, you don’t have to come.” Luce held up the cracked jug he was carrying. “Take it; I won’t tell them to follow.”

Eloise clenched her fists tightly. “Stop trying to leave me with nothing to show for this ordeal. We’ll talk. Just don’t give me cause to regret it.”

“Fine!” Luce held up his hands. “We can simply be anonymous sailors, shipwrecked in this misbegotten wasteland.”

“Exactly.” Eloise grabbed his hand and pulled it down. “No real names, either.”

As they approached the woodsmen, the clearing that they had cut through the remnants of the forest grew increasingly obvious. Past the largest concentration of workers, a short wall and ditch sectioned off their camp from the forest, a two story tower stretching above it. The construction looked recent, surprisingly clean and fresh for an outdoor encampment, but there were already signs of damage along the outer wall.

“This isn’t right,” Luce muttered as they approached. “They’re far too dug in, far too deep in the forest. It doesn’t make sense.”

Eloise scoffed. “It does when you realize what greedy fuckers you lot are. Not that I don’t live in a house of glass on that front, mind, but still. You say that this is unnecessary? What’s necessary has nothing to do with it. They see a profit to be made, and that’s all the motivation needed.”

“An operation here needs official sanction from the crown. Father would never—” He was interrupted by Eloise’s hand in his face. He glared, but remained silent, since someone was approaching them.

“Well, you lot look like shit.” Stout and large, the man greeting them smiled with red cheeks. “What in Khali’s name brings you to the end of the world?”

“Shipwreck,” Eloise said with narrowed brows. “We were en route to the Arboreum when the rocks caught us. Had to walk this far.”

“Khali’s curse, you’re lucky to be alive.” The man snorted. “I’m amazed the spirit-touched didn’t getcha, the way they’ve been stirring round these parts.” He held out a calloused hand to Luce. “Name’s Lyle.”

“Lu-Luke.” Luce gave the man a firm shake. “And this is my companion, Esmerelda.”

Eloise looked like she was trying to set him on fire with her eyes for that, but she didn’t break the ruse. “Charmed,” she managed to choke out when Lyle offered her his hand in turn. “We’re looking to get to Malin, by way of Charenton.”

“Is there any chance we could catch a ride across the river?” Luce added.

Lyle chuckled, his gut rumbling in turn. “You’re in luck! One of me boys got into a tussle with one of them creatures, looks near to losing his bloody arm.”

“Very lucky indeed,” Eloise said wryly. “That’s just what I’d call it.”

“Well, that’s not how I meant it.” Lyle rubbed the back of his neck. “Only meant that we’re ferrying him back right away. Doctor in Charenton should sew him up right, or at least give him the best chance he’s got at keeping the arm. Won’t trouble us none if you hop on board too. Can’t imagine leaving anyone stranded in these parts.”

You have no idea.

“Thank you,” said Luce, scarcely believing their good fortune.

Against all odds, Eloise didn’t pull any shenanigans at the woodland camp, nor on the ferry across the river.

Even when they reached Charenton, despite being her usual irritating self, she didn’t show any signs of betrayal. No attempts to spirit him away as her captive, no threats to his life… She didn’t even argue with the captain whose ship they bought passage aboard. If she had tried something, he’d have called for a town guard in an instant, but there was no reason to break an agreement and risk her ire if anything went wrong.

Better to simply honor it and be rid of her forever once he reached Malin.

As much as his heart ached for home, and everything that it entailed, Malin needed him. And Luce needed answers.

It wouldn’t be long now.