Path was tired after the day and the sadness that weighed on her, but she was not tired enough to feel at ease as Dainin led Oberon down the grassy hill toward the beach where there looked to be about a dozen elves milling around. They all had different jewel and metallic tones to their skin. Whether they were men or women, the dress seemed to be the same, pants that cut off usually just below their knees, different scarves, sashes, tattoos, piercings, and embroidery on clothes that were ironically a little tattered for the decorations sewn into them.

She kept staring down at the top of Dainin’s head, waiting for some sign that he was tense or had some sort of plan for the situation that involved protecting them from these ruffians. She had seen pirates swarm ships at seas, and without mercy, murder everyone on board and take what was of value and leave the ship adrift behind them. Why on earth are we going down to them?

But Dainin seemed completely at ease with these pirates. His Goddess is angry at me for stealing an artifact? And yet these…?

She has a hard time not feeling a little angry while she thinks about it. She took a deep breath and stopped thinking about it for a minute. They came to where there was a big bonfire on the beach. An elf wearing a bunch of bells on his ankles was shoveling embers out of the fire and onto some metal cylinder-shaped things.

“Well, isn’t this a sight?” A woman asked who had a scare from the top of the left side of her forehead in a straight line through her eyebrow, disrupting the wrinkles at the corner of her eye where it stopped near her ear. “A couple of people walkin’ right up to us from the road. What’s up, wanna be pirates?”

“Oh hey, desert elf?” another one said to Dainin.

“Yes, my mother,” he smiled. “I may not look like it, Brother and Sisters in Fortune, but I serve the Lady Luck, and to pay our toll, I have come to offer blessings in the name of Goddess Mysteera.”

The demeanor of the elves shifted, they stood in a way that showed they were more open toward Dainin, and smiles lit up their faces. “Hey! A brother!” the woman says, moving forward to take Dainin’s hand and arm, grinning, showing off missing teeth. “Captain Wistari.”

“We’re making baked casserole and bread, with some beef someone kindly donated earlier, we’re all pretty excited,” the man who seemed to be in charge of cooking said. “No seafood for us for a couple of days!”

Dainin smiled. “Excellent!” He put out his hand and shook several more hands, nodding to everyone. Path stayed up on Oberon, who was standing as if sleepy and bored. He introduced himself several more times, as “Dainin Suris,” though none of the other pirates introduced themselves.

“It is a good night, to have a Knight of Mysteera among us,” the captain said now that everyone had interacted with Dainin. “Who is your companion?”

“Lady Path. She will be traveling with me for a time.”

“No shoes? Fragile, is she, eh?” the Captain elbowed him with a big grin.

Path felt color come to her face. If I was a dragon, you’d never dare laugh at me. She wanted to be anywhere else.

Dainin paused before answering, “She is my current quest. She has recently fallen on misfortune, and those shoes are not properly hers. It’s been a very long last several days.”

Captain Wistari nodded, “We heard there was a dragon attack in the area recently?”

Path felt color coming to her face even more, and she definitely did not want to want to be here right now.

“There was,” Dainin said brightly. “It has made things difficult for us weary travelers in several ways. We’re really looking for a moment of calm tonight so we can gather our thoughts.”

Someone got and spread out a blanket on the sand, “Well, have the pretty and quiet lady come to have a seat,” said a blue-jewel-toned elf, “She has beautiful hair.”

Path huffed. Dainin came over to her, “Let’s get you down and get some food, yes?”

She looked at him, trying to ask him with her face if he really thought this was a good idea. I do not want to lose the last few gems that I have.

He just smiled up to her, and he lifted her down, carrying her in his arms to the blanket, where she stood on legs that felt unsteady.

“Looks like one of us comin’ off the sea,” jeered another of the pirates.

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“You can sit and relax,” Dainin said. He got something from Oberon’s saddle bag, put it in his pocket, and removed the heavy saddle. His armor clanked as he set it down, even though it was packed way in a bundle and wrapped.

“That’s the sound I expect a knight to make. Why are you not wearing your armor?”

“It was damaged by a falling rock, and I decided I preferred to breathe,” Dainin said brightly, sitting down on the blanket next to Path and waiving her to sit with him. She felt a little flustered by how casually he played off her damaging the armor. She sat on the blanket, crossing her legs, the skirt stretching across them and showing her ankles and shins.

“It’s a lot of work to ride a horse when you haven’t had practice,” said another one.

Someone shoved a glass of that fermented-smelling stuff she remembered from the tavern. “Have a drink!”

I do not think I want to drink it; I do not know why they are drinking it. My nose says this stuff is going to taste terrible.

Dainin would stand near her, “You can have a seat. We’ll get some food. You can try that, but if you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it.”

Dainin began to call people to him, placing a drop of a purple-swirly liquid on each of them, either hands or forehead and saying a prayer for each of them, the same one, asking Lady Luck to look upon them fondly.

She tried the fermented-smelling stuff, it tasted like sour fire against her tongue. She wrinkled her nose, the heat of it passing through her throat and settling in her belly in a way that made her question whether anyone should drink this stuff.

“Not your thing?” Dainin asked.

“Why do you drink it?”

“Because enough of that stuff starts to make you feel a little like a different person.”

She frowned at it.

He took the cup from her and he drank it in several big gulps, “Hey, brothers, can we have something softer for my companion?” he said brightly, a pink flush on his cheeks.

When she was offered the cup again, it had just clean water in it with a few chunks of fruit floating in it. She found she liked this a lot better, the elf who gave it to her looking shorter, perhaps younger than the rest. The ruby-toned boy giggled when she met his eyes and he moved away.

Dainin continued blessing pirates and reciting bits of scripture while they brought him more cups of his own to drink. When they served food, it was with a chunk of torn bread with a dark crusty bottom and some sort of grainy food in a bowl with chunks of browned meat in it. She was handed the rounded metal thing that she saw other people using to scoop food from their bowls.

Dainin would meet her eyes and tilt his hand slightly toward her, she mimicked the way he held it. She held the bowl closer to her mouth as she ate.

The pirates all sat around with them, even the ones blocking the road earlier, and they began to tell stories to Dainin about events on the sea, teasing each other about incidents that happened on the boat. Path was silent as she listened to these people interacting, watching how some sulked, how some laughed, and taking in how noisy it was. Dainin encouraged them, saying things like, “Really?” or “No! You cannot be serious?” There were more of those drinks getting passed around, people got louder and more boisterous. Even Dainin got louder.

Something about this makes me feel a little sad. Why is that? She thought about it, how she had found everyone here threatening at first, and then she began to understand a little. I was missing out on this sense of companionship I see around me.

She rubbed at the neck where she had been bitten. There was no room for our family in Myraduil, but on the wild coast, you have to fight, so I was…

She stopped thinking as a pirate was saying something truly ridiculous, “I’m telling you, it was an upside-down ship walking along on spider legs on the beach,” the elf insisted.

“And how drunk were you?” Dainin teased along with everyone else.

“I was not. But I am telling you, it was at least a two-sail ship, upside down, this giant pincer arm was hanging out of the side of the boat, and it was chasing something down the beach.

“He was in the crow’s nest, and the rest of us could not quite see it,” Captain Wisteria said to explain it.

“I’m telling you, when it wanders down this beach and to that next town, they’re gonna know scary!”

“Tall tales,” said another one of the pirates, and there was a whole lot of laughing.

Captain Wistari disrupted this though, “There’s been plenty of big things crawling out of the deep though, coming up to the surface, displacing ships. People have gone missing, you know. Maybe there are forest gods for the land and so also there are gods for the sea.”

“But land gods usually talk, don’t they? Who has ever talked to a giant crab or whatever? No one.”

Path was quiet. She’d never seen anything like what the men were talking about.

It got a bit later. The pirates went back to their ship to sleep, but they gave Dainin some blankets, so long as he promised to keep the fire going for breakfast.

Once they were alone, Path huffed, “You really want to sleep here?”

“Why not?”

“Why would we? They are pirates.”

“Yes.”

“So?” Path pressed, feeling frustrated at him.

“Well, we all worship Myseteera. Honestly, I feel safer with these pirates than I would in a noble’s hall. They aren’t going to want to test Lady Luck’s disfavor,” he said, patting her knee and then getting her a pillow and a blanket.

I guess that is fair. I would go back in time and undo my choices to earn her disfavor if I could. She rubbed the amethyst ring on her thumb. She sat up for a while, Dainin fell asleep almost instantly and began to snore. His face was still flushed a bit red.

The smells of the fire, bits of leftover food around, and the alcohol made the smell of the sea a little unfamiliar to her. She sat up for a little while, examining the ring looking without too much hope for a way out of the spell that bound her.