I was not a very happy man for much of the rest of the winter. Survivor’s guilt, clinical depression, call it what you want, but there was a hollow place inside me with twelve names etched in blood, Lapina’s the most prominent among them.

No matter how many times people told me that it wasn’t my fault, that the bandits were responsible not me, I didn’t believe them. Those things were easy for people to say to someone who was obviously suffering but the majority of them weren’t there. They didn’t see me choose the forks in the road that lead us to that battle, that pyrrhic victory. I wasn’t naive enough to believe that we could have escaped battle without loss but I realistically thought that if I had made better decisions I could have mitigated that loss quite a bit.

Some anonymous benefactor donated twenty five gold to the families of each of the young orcs who were slain. The same anonymous person commissioned a statue, a memorial to the brave young orcs who had faced down the bandit threat, to be placed in the center of the village. Spending the money didn’t make the anonymous person feel any better.

Goulug and I met with each other every other day trying to plan how we would replenish our herds. Although I had talked about walking back to Westfield if necessary, I really didn’t want to go all that way. I would if I needed to, but I thought there were places that could supply our needs that were closer by. It was fairly easy to replenish our chickens. They were fairly inexpensive and people around the plateau could always part with a few. Swine, elands and oxen or horses were not easy to procure in the dead of winter, at least not without travel and the weather wasn’t too conducive to travel yet.

I made it my practice to go into town every third day or so. This was to make myself available to any of the people I had promised to help. A couple of people took me up on my offer but by and large my offer remained just that. The tasks that they asked for help on were simple. One day, I helped replace the roof on a small house. It took very little time. The second time I was asked for help, there was a sick infant boy and his parent couldn’t afford medicine. The medicine only cost a couple of gold. Of course, I bought it. Honestly, the more I thought about it the more I realized that the people who had come to me for help probably didn’t really need it. They asked me for help just to make me feel better. The strange thing is that even providing that little bit of help did improve my mood. Like I have said before, sometimes good people find you.

Because I had quite a bit of free time when I was in town, I made the rounds. The two people I spent the most time talking to were Anxo and, surprisingly, Sathebeena. Anxo was having a bit of a bad time as well, and as they say misery loves company. We went through the what ifs so many times that eventually we just gave up and started talking about more innocuous things -- the weather, town gossip, crap like that. Sathebeena I visited because she treated me like she always had. She was perhaps a bit warmer than when we first met, and I felt like we were genuinely starting to become friends instead of just business acquaintances, but I stopped by because she gave me incessant shit. Continuously she dug at me. Making fun of people must have been her love language and she was very fluent. She was caustic and clever and she made me laugh, and laughter was a precious commodity that winter.

Not everyone in town was happy to see me. Most people were at least outwardly pleasant. Of course, I didn’t know what they said about me when I wasn’t around. A couple of the families, though, had taken to pointedly avoiding me, going so far as crossing the street when they saw me coming towards them. I didn’t blame them one bit.

Back at home, when she caught me moping around, Aleyda took to beating the crap out of me. Sure, she called it training or sparring but it usually ended in the same way, me nursing a whole new collection of bumps and bruises. I have to admit that training was good medicine. When I was sparring my mind shut off. When someone is coming at you with a blunted weapon and has shown no compunction against injuring you with it, you pay attention. That’s about all you can pay attention to, honestly. She knew what she was doing, causing me to live in the moment, no mental bandwidth left for worry. She brought me relief from my sorrow and I imagine obtained some from her own. It didn’t help my ego any when other people would stop in and watch. I think they bet each other how many times I could touch Aleyda. The target number was not usually set very high. Beyond the mental health aspects of the training, it otherwise did me quite a bit of good. As the days passed, I did a much better job of dishing out some punishment as well as receiving it.

I spent a lot of my time alone in my room working on my magic. I got to the point that I could reliably manifest light while I was awake. It would probably all fall apart if I tried to do it while I was under stress but even so it felt like an accomplishment. I was still missing something vitally important, though. That missing thing was understanding. Out of all things, why did I have an affinity to light? Until I answered that question, I feared my progress was stalled at the most rudimentary level. And I didn’t have a clue about how to begin answering that question. Aristotle reportedly said that “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” If that was true, I wasn’t very wise. I spent a lot of time thinking about light, meditating about it, but in the end I lacked any real insight. Honestly, I was a little fearful to know myself. What if I didn’t like me very much when I did?

The other people around the house provided support to me in the best ways they could. Jahhaf cooked my favorite things. I didn’t know whether he had always been such a quiet man but he provided support through actions, not words. Sometimes, when I was in a deep funk, Mero would bug me until I would play with him. It was hard to tell such an earnest child no. Werner tried to distract me with his new inventions, which were really just things other people had invented that he was trying to adapt to local technology. Many times, Marriam, Xeng, Patrick, Bowen and Aleyda stayed up with me deep into the night, planning and scheming about our shared futures. I didn’t get as much sleep as I should have because when I slept the dreams came and they were not good dreams.

I think Bowen was the most perplexed about my reaction to the battle. In his former life, he had probably ordered men and women to their deaths on multiple occasions. He was inured to the experience, toughened by his daily reality. Before coming to this world, though, he and I had lived very different lives. He had no problem hurting other people, while the only person I had ever really hurt was myself unless you include the emotional toll on my family and friends.

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Days passed, the weather started to warm. and things got better for me. Instead of dwelling so much on one night on a hilltop in the dead of winter, I started thinking about the future again. I knew where that future still led, and that was the island. I couldn’t afford to be sessile. I couldn’t save everyone but I thought I could save some. Of course, rebuilding the herds and getting crops planted was a primary concern, so the timing for everything would need to be pushed back a little bit.

I hired Ugor, Goulug’s wife, to come over a couple of times a week and give everyone else language lessons. The ability to communicate would be necessary if my people were to survive in my absence. Based upon the bewildered expressions on many of my people’s faces, the local language was not particularly easy to learn. Everyone diligently tried to retain what they could. None of them would be having grand conversations about the meaning of life in the local vernacular but, over time, some of them probably learned enough to conduct basic business transactions.

Once spring finally arrived, Goulug and I scoured the surrounding area for livestock. Late spring was birthing season for the elands, and so we were able to acquire some but they were all either very old or very young. Nobody wanted to part with adult elands in the prime of their life. I understood. I also gave Goulug a fistful of gold in case an opportunity ever crossed his path for something better. We replenished our swine by overpaying for animals that were about to be slaughtered. I put the word out to the traders who had once again begun moving through the area in the better weather that I was looking for oxen and horses and I was paying well. Eventually, one of the traders who traveled all the way out to Sleetfield came to my property with an ox and a pair of horses he had acquired from out in ranch country, turning a pretty profit on the transaction.

I was starting to feel the pinch as my wealth, which at times had seemed to be so bottomless, continued to dry up. Don’t get me wrong. I still had close to a thousand gold pieces worth of stuff but once that money was gone I wasn’t sure there would be an easy way to get more. Perhaps we could sneak back out to the redoubt and plunder the valuables that I couldn’t carry when I left the place but that would only work if I could find my way there again. Otherwise, we would need to make a living like everyone else, through the strength of our minds and the sweat of our labor.

Late in the spring I was over at Goulug’s place. We had spent the day plowing. I couldn’t complain because I had received a great meal for my trouble. We sat there with tired bodies, chatting about a variety of small things when I broached the subject.

“Would you help look after my people and my property for me? I am going to take a couple of the others with me and will be gone for awhile. I’m not sure how long.”

“Of course I will,” he replied. “Where are you headed to?”

“The island,” I answered.

“The island? Why would you go there after working so hard to build everything over the last few seasons. Are you that short on money?”

“No, it isn’t that. I could be perfectly content staying here until they put me into the ground. Honestly, I feel more connected to this place than anywhere I have ever lived in my life. To give you an answer, though, I need to ask you a question. You have spent a significant amount of time with the five-fingered humans who live with me. In this society, they are termed slaves, but I have never treated them like slaves. They are my partners. We are trying to build something. In all the time that you have spent with them, did you ever feel like they were lesser somehow? Did you ever think they were stupid, or lazy, or conniving, or murderous, or one of the dozen other derogatory terms that are hung on people of their type?”

He sat there for a few moments, pondering my question. He started talking a couple of times, but quickly stopped to think some more. Finally, he spoke.

“Please don’t repeat this to anyone,” he said. “I’m not sure they would understand, not having the experiences that I have had. To answer your question, though, your slaves just seem like people. Like all people, some of them I like more and some of them I like less. The ones that rub me the wrong way do so not because they are five-fingered but because I just don’t like them that much. There are people around here that I have known all my life who I like less. I think the way some people treat their slaves is terrible. I know that slavery is not practiced in some of the territories closer to the inner sea but those places don’t have the same history of invasion like we do. I wouldn’t publicly admit it, but I think the way you treat your people is a good thing.”

“Did you know that every one of them came from that island?” I asked. “I have talked to them all and they share a similar story. They went to sleep one night in their own world and woke up in this one. They didn’t know anyone. They didn’t know where they were. Many of them didn’t have the skills necessary to survive. They were torn from their friends and family, from everything familiar, by some cosmic force. Many of them had good lives. Lives they can never get back. That’s the story for every one of those slaves that are shipped off that island. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you react? Would you survive? I want, I need, to go to that island to find more people like them. Like you said, people are people. Some people are villains. Some people are saints. But there is a lot of gray area in between where most of us live. I know I can’t save everyone. I know I can’t help most of them. I feel a driving need to help the few that I can.”

“You’re a better person that I am, James,” he replied. “I would never even think to do something like that. I suggest you keep your true thoughts quiet. I am your friend and I don’t want to see you get hurt. I think I can understand why you feel the way you do. It’s probably the same reason that you were moping around all winter. You feel very deeply, both good and bad. I will help you and not stop you. Just promise me that you won’t be doing this every year.”

I winked at him. “No promise,” I said. Then, I reached out and pulled him into a hug.

“None of that,” he said, pushing me away with a laugh. “You really don’t want to make Ugor jealous. She gets violent when she is jealous.”