Marco woke up in his room, or at least one of the many rooms on the island that looked exactly like it. He was pleased to find he woke up alive when not waking up or waking up dead somewhere were options. He didn’t feel quite ready for the afterlife or lack of it. That revulsion towards perishing only grew stronger when he saw Aethe already sitting by his bed, quietly reading a book on the Outer Seas.

“Is that good?” Marco asked.

“It’s lies. Probably.” Aethe folded the book closed and set it down. “The person writing it has never been there, so it’s tall tales. I hope. It talked about a lot of monsters as big as bays, and I don’t think we are quite to that level yet.”

“Just go for the eyes.” Marco pantomimed shooting an arrow to the ceiling and felt his whole body complain from the motion. “He stayed down?”

“Steed did.” Aethe leaned over and kissed Marco softly on the forehead. “But I’m supposed to tell several older people when you wake up, and they made me promise not to dally. Are you good for a few minutes?”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll let everyone know.”

The first people to come through the door after that were not members of his team or Aethe, but instead a bartender and a very peeved-looking woman. Marco thought he could tell that the annoyance was fake but decided not to risk things.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized.

“For what, boy? Speak up,” the woman barked.

“I’m sorry for kicking a pirate colony like a wasp hive then dragging the remnants of a very angry nautical force through your town.”

“It’s not just that, boy! It’s…” She paused for a moment and shook her head angrily. “Well, it is just that, but that’s bad enough!”

“I agree. Like I said, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t listen to her too much.” The bartender sat down in the chair next to his bed. “Her cannons took out the first wave, and then I took out most of what was left after that. She lost one person, an old man who was trying to sketch the battle for a book. You can’t fix that kind of thinking.”

Marco winced. He was pretty sure he knew the old man, which meant Elisa had just lost a friend and an acquaintance had just lost a husband.

“He was old,” the old woman said gently. “Old enough to know better, and old enough to take those kinds of risks not caring what the outcomes were. Some people just make choices.”

Marco lay still for a while while the woman waited for him to speak. He didn’t have the words to help them. After they figured out he wasn’t going to hold up his end of the conversation, they picked up the slack for him.

“Well, it’s over, anyway. And it helped that a certain someone took care of the pirates after the first wave and verified there are hardly any pirates left in the vicinity after that mess,” the old woman said.

“Really?” Marco looked at the bartender. “That was fast. I thought you were still rebuilding your ship. There were some nasty ships in that armada.”

“Not me, Marco. Him,” Heldol said.

Marco followed her outstretched finger to the door, where a large, official-looking, and very deadly ship captain was just walking through the door.

“Frisk,” Marco whispered.

Frisk nodded. “Marco. No, don’t get up. I’m not here to cause trouble. I had to promise that to come here peacefully.”

“And yet you’ll be waiting out in the water for me somewhere.” Marco’s mouth was dry, both from a lack of water and sheer anger at the situation. “To hunt me and my friends.”

“Shh, Marco,” the old woman said. “Things change, sometimes. Especially when you change them. Let him talk.”

The captain walked over to the wall closest to Marco’s bed and leaned.

“Don’t take this as you having won. I think we both know you haven’t, and from what I can tell about you, I don’t think you’d want to win that way anyway.”

Marco nodded. It was probably accurate, too. There were a limited number of things the captain could mean, and he agreed with all of them.

“So let’s talk logistics instead. I got sent out from a very nice island to find a boy. Easy, you’d think. Simple.” The captain reached into one of his pockets, extracted a cigarette case, and lit one up. The drag he took from it was not merely cosmetic. “I sailed for much longer than I should have had to in order to find him, through another dimension in fact. Then I found him, and he disappeared. Then I found him again but didn’t know it. I found him one last time, and this iron wall wouldn’t let me get to him.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

He was talking about the old woman now. Marco looked to see if she objected to being called an iron wall, and it really didn’t seem she did. If anything, she looked amused.

“A mission like this and a force as large as mine go well so long as nothing unexpected happens and I keep morale up. What do you think happens to morale when my ship comes into view of a friendly port full of pirate ships?” Frisk paused but clearly didn’t intend anyone to answer that question. “We cleared the ships. It wasn’t a nice thing. Then the island tells the crew that Marco was the one who took down the captain of the pirates? Remember, they are purposefully speaking loud enough so my entire crew can hear. That, combined with the cabin boy and cook’s words, is enough to turn some heads.”

The old woman tried to keep a straight face and mostly succeeded.

“That sounds rough, and I’m sorry, I guess,” Marco said. “Now please explain what it has to do with me.”

“You’re a hero now, I guess. Whatever my job is, it isn’t bringing in heroes.”

“Bull.”

“No, really. I take orders, Marco, but for someone like me those orders aren’t absolute. I can disobey them. It just might cost me something. But sometimes, those are prices you have to pay. I’m cutting my losses and going home with my reputation intact.” He frowned and took another drag off his cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and put it out with his heel. “Or mostly intact. The way I figure, it will take me a few weeks to get home without that little shortcut you found and another ship at least that long to get out here. You have a month to heal and get ready, but I know the next guy they’ll send, and he doesn’t care about his reputation so much. I’d be gone then, if I were you.”

—

A few days later, Marco had just polished off a thick drink made of fruit when Aethe finally signaled to him that it was time to start talking again.

“So this is a date,” Marco said.

“That’s my understanding. Remember I don’t know anything more about it than you do,” she replied.

They had eaten dinner, gone on a long walk, went down to the docks to stare at the ocean, and had even taken in a show, at least as judged by a standard that counted a single bard on stage as a show. That was close to all the island had to offer, and Marco had no idea if it was enough. He looked at Aethe questioningly until she got the hint and put him out of his misery.

“It was fine, Marco.” She patted his leg. “I’m glad you did it for me. I’m surprised you could do so much with so little and so little time.”

“But.”

“But dates are boring,” she said. “I don’t mean really boring. I just mean boring compared to other things we could be doing.”

Marco stared at her questioningly again, in a different way.

“Not that, pirate. Not that.” Aethe laughed. “I just meant we could be fighting other pirates. Or monsters.”

“Oh, you just meant that? I see.”

“You know what I mean. I like spending time with you, but I like spending time with who you are. Where you are supposed to be.” She looked out at the ocean again. “That’s where I want to see you.”

“Oh. Does that mean you decided to come with me after all?”

“You thought I was deciding?” Aethe laughed. “It’s where I want to be, Marco. I joined your crew for a reason. It’s fun out there. Besides, where else would I even go?”

This was enough, it turned out, to throw Aethe into her first-ever giggling fit. She was not entirely through it when Riv and Elisa approached them to see what was up.

“You broke her,” Riv said. “I didn’t think it could be done. Elves aren’t supposed to be giggling.”

“He’s probably fixing her, Riv. It seems to be his thing. Now tell him before he breaks,” Elisa said.

“Tell me what?”

“That I’m going along too,” Riv said. “I got a message back to my parents on Frisk’s ship. It turns out he can do that when he stops in place long enough. They say I should go find my fortune, or something along those lines.”

“Just that easy?”

“Just that easy. Just like your dad.”

Marco patted the letter in his pocket. Frisk actually had a letter with him from the very beginning of the chase, it turned out, sealed with wax and unbreakable under maritime law. Tatrick had been very spare with his words, too, which made it easy to remember.

When Marco had read the letter, he had almost been too distracted to remember his system notifications. He was glad that he didn’t forget. To the point where he was still enamored with what his new stats looked like.

“And you?” Marco looked to Elisa. “What do you think?”

“I think that you’re an idiot if you think I’m going back to become an apprentice calligrapher or something.” Elisa lit up her hands with lightning, then sent a softball-sized pulse of it forward, floating through the air as a slow-moving hazard. “Just a little something I got from uncovering and documenting an ancient temple. I want more stuff like that, Marco.”

“Well then,” Marco said. “Is there much point in waiting, then?”

Frisk had promised them a month of rest, and they had used a few days of it. The old woman had warned them they might not have so much time as he said, but even if he went back on his word and alerted the new Marco-chaser immediately, they had two weeks to play with. The team looked out to the ocean, then down to The Foolish Endeavor. From the look in their eyes, he knew they agreed with him.

Two weeks was a long time. If they were going to spend it, they’d rather spend it out there.