After the painful few weeks spent with Roth, the new few months felt like a separate life. Rebert, Shay, and I had boarded a merchant ship that journeyed south alongside the shores, trading goods and wares. It wasn’t a huge ship, and the waves were easily felt, but the crew was friendly, and the salty air was something I grew to love. The constant breeze, good weather, and new sights were almost enough to push the past events out of my mind.

Peace came easy when I was awake. But when I slept after a long day in the sun, my nightmares chased me in the dark. My father would scream for me to help him, somehow still able to speak despite his face being caved in by the mad warrior.

I had saved Shay, but she wasn’t the same as before. After a few weeks, she had stopped trying to crack her neck, but I would catch her staring out across the seas with blank dead eyes that seemed to see something I couldn’t. She had a haunted look, and I couldn’t blame her. Perhaps she had seen something out there--in the strange place I had been with her.

I remember the look of betrayal in her eyes--not at me, but at the horror of having her neck snapped. I didn’t know if I could call what I did magic, but I didn’t know what else to call it. Sometimes, if I focused on the lull of the waves and closed my eyes, I could feel the quiet world that we had escaped to, and there were whispers there—small traces of light that played against my eyes and called out to me. The strangeness of it all frightened me, but some part of me found it comforting in an odd way--like an old friend calling out to you finally after sensing there was someone else there all along.

“You should talk to Rebert,” Shay said as she approached and put a light hand on my shoulder. I winced. After the fight, somehow Rebert had escaped with us. He hadn’t bothered explaining how. And I hadn’t asked. For a time, all I could think about was the pain. He had amputated my arm--and cut off the rot so it didn’t spread through the rest of my body. It was still a stump, but it was no longer bleeding, but it was as if I could still feel the hand there somehow.

At the time, I had barely spoken to the man. He hadn’t approached me on the ship, and I had stayed away from him. He felt like a dark cloud, always brooding and glaring at me, and even the other sailors. I wondered why he had risked his life to save us, and I felt that he regretted it. But he was on the ship now, and bound to us in his defiance, and I supposed that he could never and would never go back to Roth.

I shrugged, not knowing what to say, and Shay squeezed my hand and smiled. “He’s a good man.”

I looked at her and could tell she meant it. I shrugged again, not sure if he was or wasn’t. He had seen good men die--like my father, and done nothing to stop it. And he had traveled with a group of killers.

“He knows something about you, you know. About what you can do.” She looked at me intently then, her blue eyes furrowing. I looked away.

“And what’s that?” I said quietly.

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“You have a gift,” she said, even quieter still.

I remembered the cold of the quiet and Shay stealing the warmth from my arm--the very life of it seemed to leave my own body as Shay clutched and stole and stole it all from me.I blinked and realized I had been staring at her. She shifted and turned to look out at the sea.

“I’m sorry” she whispered, and she looked at my stump. I shrugged, as if the missing limb didn’t matter to me. Somehow, incredibly, it had saved her life--but I was paying the cost, and would forever.

The weeks continued, and I made friends with one of the ship's hands. He was a boy of my own age, small of stature but quick of hand and wit. The other sailors seemed to love him, although none were his kin.

After his chores, he’d sneak away to talk with me and tell me strange tales of his homeland. He claimed that he had been a castaway, but the sailors couldn’t get rid of him, so they had taken him as a part of the crew. He claimed that he was from the woodlands--the mountain folk’s home north of Mildor.

At that time, I had no idea where Mildor was--and I could not begin to guess at the size and scope of the church’s capital. Clidale’s family and many others in the nearby region fell victim to its expansion.

His family were simple farmers like mine, with their own goats, crops, and land. But the church required tithe, and when his family was resilient to the idea, the church enslaved them all and shipped them away as slaves.

When I asked him if he missed his parents, he would smile and insist he would see them again. I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t want to crush his spirit. Clidale always had a sly grin on his brown suntanned face--so often it was hard to tell if he told the truth or not. But I sensed a goodness in him, and I was captivated by his tales of his people. He spoke of trees taller than any building, and buildings that climbed the trees, and rope bridges that extended for miles.

We grew close, and it wasn’t long before Clidale and Shay were good friends too. But no matter how much we laughed or swam in the sea at anchor, I could always sense Rebert staring at us. I would catch the man eyeing me as if he had something to say but didn’t yet have the intention of saying it.

We sailed for nearly a year, up and down the coast. I began to enjoy the harsh beat of the sun on my back, and I grew strong and lean with the strict work that the captain required of all of us. The other men didn’t seem to mind that I only had one arm, and soon I began to get used to it too.

Perhaps most interesting was Southland Harbor. More so than any other city, it was a buzzing hub of different cultures and people. Strange slant-eyed islanders frequented the town, journeying from islands west and south of the town from another continent entirely, bringing strange goods that could blow beautiful melodies in the air, or spiced food that scalded my entire mouth.

It was here that I saw more dark people, or Shinarin as I would learn later, than any other city. Shinarin would travel and trade with the islanders, and both people from both cultures made the place their home. Most of them migrated from the northern deserts, fleeing the ever expanding grip .

When we were in Southland Harbor, I could see the love in Rebert’s eyes for his own people. He would buy strange prickly fruits and laugh with the merchants as if they were his family. Perhaps some of them were. I didn’t know the man was capable of a smile, but when his white teeth flashed, he looked like a different man entirely. I wondered why the man had been with Roth, and not his own people. But while Rebert seemed to be at home in Southland, it was here that he finally convinced me that our journey at sea would have to end.