Rhea awoke in a daze, her head pounding and her stomach in knots. In the dim light of the grey afternoon, she struggled to tell if she was yet awake. The powder she had taken the night before was quickly working its way out of her system, and she shivered beneath the leaf, drained of most of her strength.

  Laying with only one foot in the world of the waking, memories of the night before came crashing back, bringing with them painful waves of guilt and shame. Thinking of Az, her eyes shot open and terror gripped her breast. Where had she last seen him? Was it before the crash, wounded on the deck of the Katorga? She felt as though she had seen him again in the night, but had that been a dream? Again, her thoughts shifted to her nightmares, now blending with her memories and bringing to mind all she hated about herself.

  In her dreams she had been a girl again, standing before Eris and Nyxia in the witch’s hut. Between them had been a large cauldron, bubbling on the fire. The women had loomed over her, berating her and telling her to drink. And when she had, in tears, lifted the lid at last, Az’s face had looked up at her from where it sat, boiling in the pot. “You did this,” he had said, his voice filled with hatred and betrayal. “Serves me right to trust a witch. You bring nothing but despair.”

  Blinking the world into focus, Rhea looked around, hardly believing her eyes as a figure emerged from the mist and rain. It was Az, supporting a woman as she walked with an arm over his shoulder. Rhea recognized her instantly as the one she had rescued from the galley. Overjoyed at the sight of him, she made to speak but the words caught in her throat. Instead, she lay in silence, her eyes fixed on his every move.

  Watching Az tuck in the injured woman, Rhea was gripped by a strange forlorn feeling she wasn’t sure she had ever felt before. With wide eyes, she followed his every gentle motion and tender act of kindness. In the back of her mind, she knew it must have looked the same when he had laid her down beneath her leaf and nursed her in her sleep. But in her heart, she could not help but feel threatened, watching her one and only companion tend to another with such care. Only when he had finished and their eyes met, did Rhea find her voice at last.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’ll be alright.”

  “Will you? Here, let me look at it.” Rhea made to peel back the leaf, only then realizing she was without her robes. She froze, looking down at herself with embarrassment.

  “Here, I got you these.” Az gathered up the still damp articles of clothing and passed them to her.

  Seeing the clothes, Rhea knew them at once to be those of Elijah. Guessing what their origin must be, she felt another pang of guilt and a deep sense of appreciation for what Az must have gone through to get them – especially in his injured state. Struggling slightly with the damp material, she pulled them on and stood on shaky legs. They were too large for her, the loose collar of the grey-green shirt sagging down so as to leave many of her scars visible. Pulling the drawstring of the pants tight, she crossed to Az and began inspecting his wound. It looked terrible, the skin around it inflamed and already showing clear signs of infection. Reaching into her shirt, Rhea undid the strap on which hung a half-dozen pouches. Squeezing them, Rhea selected one that was rigid, opening it and revealing a tiny glass vial filled with dark green oil. Uncorking it, she pored the tiniest possible drop onto the tips of her fingers and began applying it to the wound.

  “What is it?” asked Az.

  “Wild Oregano oil. We’re lucky that the vial didn’t break in the crash. It would not be easy to make out in the wild. But there’s not much here. It’ll be gone long before that wound is healed.”

  “I’m sure we’ll find something.”

  “We’d better. Oregano grows all over these parts, but you need to have oil to steam it in.” Rhea looked around. “Doesn’t look like we have much of anything.”

  Az shook his head. “Just our lives. Which is more than we could ask for.”

  Stopping what she was doing, Rhea looked from his ruined shoulder to his exhausted and disheveled face. She felt as though she might cry. “Az… I’m-”

  “I know.” He gave her a weak smile, setting a big hand on her thin shoulder. “So am I. Now, patch me up, I’m starving.”

  When Az’s arm was bound, he showed her with pride to the leaf containing the worm he had ‘caught’. Only half opening it, Rhea found the worm soggy and disgusting. Wrinkling her nose, she set it aside. This wouldn’t do at all, she thought. The big lug had done a lot to get them this far, but he certainly wasn’t much of a woodsman. It was time to find some food and figure out where they were. “Why don’t you rest up, and let me find us something to eat,” she said.

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  Letting out a great sigh of relief, Az smiled. “I hoped you’d say that.” Crossing to the rhubarb he sat with his back to a large stalk. “I’ll wait here,” he said, leaning back wearily and appearing to fall asleep before her very eyes.

  Leaving the shore, Rhea made her way to the treeline, keeping an eye out for a fallen branch. Though the sky was still grey, the rain had stopped and the day had become warm and steamy. Coming to the foot of a large oak, she found what she was looking for. Laying heavy over the grass and shrubs was a large branch, snapped free by the previous days storm. Walking it from top to bottom, Rhea selected a straight twig slightly narrower than her own wrist, and set to work with her knife, cutting it free and carving a sharp point. That done, she headed back into the grass, gently slipping between the stalks and listening for the chirp of crickets emerging from their burrows after the heavy rain. Within a half hour she had speared five, threading each onto a thin stalk of grass and looping it across her back.

  Making her way back to the shore, Rhea found herself at the foot of a massive pine. Perhaps the oldest and certainly the tallest around, it shot up more than a hundred feet, its needles swaying in the gentle breeze. Scanning the area for birds of prey and finding nothing, Rhea set her spear at the foot of the pine and began climbing, her hands gripping the ridges of its thick bark. Her wits had begun to come back to her, and though hungry, the time spent alone in the woods had reminded her of her old strength, helping it to return. With practiced skill and considerable agility, Rhea scampered up the tree until she reached the top where the thin branches grew close together, sagging under her weight. Cautiously inching out onto one branch after another and pushing the needles from her way, Rhea looked out in each direction, trying to get a sense of their location.

  Looking first to the north she could see nothing, just more trees tightly packed until they reached the shore. The south was the same. To the east, the densely packed trees broke perhaps a hundred or so feet inland, and Rhea thought she might be able to see the peak of an ancient cottage poking out from the center of the clearing. Interesting, she thought, though it certainly didn’t help her to know where they were, at least the cottage provided an obvious place to get out of the elements and perhaps find some items of value. Shuffling back around to the west, she looked out over the lake. In the growing light she could see another shore separated from their own by a perhaps fifty feet of water. Was that an island, or the mainland? She couldn’t be sure. Dropping her eyes to near shore, Rhea’s heart jumped to her throat. There, making its way from the water up towards the rhubarb bush where she had left Az sleeping, was a human figure, soaking wet and dripping on the rocks.

  Nearly falling several times in her haste, Rhea raced down the tree. The climb down was slower and far more awkward than the climb up, and there was no question in her mind that the figure could easily have reached Az long before she reached the ground. Pausing only to grab her spear, Rhea tore through the long grass. Bursting out onto the shore, her bare feet slapped against the exposed granite as she made a beeline towards Az and the bush.

  Arriving with her spear raised, her heart already filled with vengeance, Rhea was shocked to find not Venali or Amon standing over Az, but the young deckhand, looking thoroughly miserable and dejected. A red-haired and deeply tanned boy of about fourteen, the deckhand leapt nearly out of his skin at the sight of Rhea, bending his knees and cowering before her. “Dwat,” he cried, bringing his hands up to shield his face. “Out of the fwying pan, into the fiwe.”

  Rhea stopped with her arm still raised, looking the boy up and down in confusion.

  “Please, don’t huwt me,” he said, once more pronouncing his ‘r’s as ‘w’s. “It’s me, from the ship. I mean you no hawm. Let me live and I pwomise that I weally am a helpful fellow. if you’d only give me a chance to pwove myself.”

  “What are you doing here?” said Rhea, lowering her spear. “And where the hell did you come from?”

  “I washed up acwoss the wata with Venali and the othews. But they’ve bwought me nothing but misewy. So, I said scwew it and came to join you folks instead.”

  “But how did you get here?”

  The boy smiled, straightening up with pride. “I’m an excellent swimmew.”

  Rhea turned, breaking her gaze from the boy and looking at the far shore. Her mind had turned once more to Venali, and she could feel the anger she had felt on the ship bubbling up inside her.

  “Don’t mind them,” said the boy. “Not a chance of them making that swim. They don’t have the stamina. Besides, we’ve got to find sheltew quick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lady, yo fwend is sick. Look at him. He looks tewwible.”

  The boy gestured to Az, and Rhea looked to find that he had indeed become pale. Still sitting where she had left him, not far from where the injured woman lay, Az had slept through the entire conversation, his breathing quick and shallow. Rhea’s heart fell. The boy was right, she needed to get him somewhere warm and dry, and quickly.

  The boy went on, clearly growing more at ease with every moment she abstained from mistreating him. “You know, I’m pwetty suwe we washed up on the east side of Lonely Lake. Venali and them awe pwobably stuck out on Fox Island. If so, they’we scwewed big time. But we got lucky. Thewe awe cawavan twails all ovew these pawts. We could find one and get the hell out of hewe. Think you can cawwy you fwiend? I can twy and help that woman.”

  Rhea looked at the strange boy, a blessing beyond any she could have expected. What greater gift could have blown up on shore, than this young optimist, so full of energy and familiar with these parts? In fact, it was not until he had started to paint a silver lining around the situation that she had begun to truly appreciate just how dire things would have been without him. Az’s life was in her hands. And if he died, she would be the one to blame. And now here was this smiling youth, arrived from out of the blue, come to help her carry the load.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Wobert,” he said with a smile. “But anyone with an ounce of sympathy calls me Bobby.”