“Camping?” Elisa said as soon as they left Quill’s big manor. “Really, Marco? We have a very nice hotel with very good food and you want to force me to go camping?”

“I’m with Elisa. This is bad boyfriend work, I think. I don’t really know, but it seems like it,” Aethe added.

“Now, now,” Riv said. “The town isn’t as nice as we thought it was, remember? And I’m sure Marco might have an actual plan here, as hard as it is to see. It is hard to see, Marco, if you didn’t pick up on that.”

“I got a hint,” Marco said with a laugh. “The barest of hints. I do have a plan. We need to walk this island. All the way around. Every little glade of trees, every cave.”

“And what do you think we’ll find?” Elisa asked. “Because that’s even worse than actual camping. We’ll barely have time to sleep if that’s really what you want to do. There’s a lot of island to cover.”

Marco led them into a shop that sold fabric, one they had stepped into before only to find the owner absent. It seemed that was a pattern, as nobody was manning the counter now, either. He eased the door shut behind them as they continued their conversation.

“Listen. Right now, we have to act as if we have an enemy. Something is wrong with this island. Something is wrong with Quill. There’s something generally not right with this entire region of the world. We don’t know who on the island we can trust, if anyone. Yes, I even mean our friends here. If Quill has control over them and they don’t realize that, there’s no way we know how deep that control goes.”

“Agreed, but what does that have to do with camping, Marco?”

“It matters because at some point, if we want any of that to change, that temple is going to play a part in it. I don’t know what part, or how, but I know there’s no way any of this ends well unless we either address the power that temple is giving him or run away entirely.”

“I’m thinking of how to say this.” Aethe was thoughtful. “But I guess it’s a question. Why doesn’t that feel like an option? We could run. We’ve all thought of it. Why aren’t we thinking about it harder?”

“Seconded,” Riv said.

“Thirded,” Elisa said, holding her hands up defensively when Marco gave her a betrayed look. “Stop doing that, Marco. I’m the information person, but that doesn’t really mean I’m our leader. It’s been a long time since we all decided to follow your lead.”

“This is really my decision?” Marco said looking at his crew. “I don’t want it to be that way. I want us to decide this together.”

“We will,” Elisa said. “I promise. None of us is shy, Marco. But without anything better to do, we are going to follow you wherever you go. We just want a better idea of where that is.”

Marco let out a long, shaky breath.

“Whew. Okay. It’s sort of like this.” Marco pointed to a rack of cloth. “All this cloth is different. Why? I’m not kidding. I don’t know why this cloth is different from everything else in the shop.”

“That rack’s all silk,” Elisa said. “The whole rack.”

“Okay. Silk. But it’s all different. Like this is a different color than that, and these have different thicknesses. Why?”

“Because it’s for different things. Dresses. Bedding. Stuff like that,” Riv said. “Even I know that, Marco.”

“My adoptive father was a big fan of canvas. That meant everything I had was made out of canvas.” Marco touched some of the silk, the finer stuff. It slipped through his fingers with no friction, almost like it was greased. “Anyway. So it’s all different, but it’s all the same. Now, my class. I kill fish, I get fish powers for the ship. I beat down other captains on the and my equipment gets better, which is pretty much the same thing as my class getting better.”

Nobody had any objections or questions about that. He kind of wished they did. This wasn’t a conversation he had very well structured in his head, and the interruptions would have given him more time. He plowed on, hoping he’d come out the other side with an actual point.

“Steed was the same way, kind of. His class was the same,” Marco said.

“He ran an armada of darkness, Marco.”

“Sure. But he picked up permanent strength from it. The more he did it, the more he got out of it. If I extinguish the life of a fish, I get some of what made that fish powerful. If Steed let a ship join his armada or lost a ship while it was still part of it, he got something from those ships. Both of us were consuming things, in a way. Growing by destroying.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Huh,” Elisa said. “Kind of.”

“You didn’t fight him directly in the same way that I did. I could feel that we were the same, more or less. I could feel it from Quill just standing near him. He has a class just like mine, Elisa. Like this silk or that silk. It looks like it’s different, but in some fundamental way it’s the same.”

“I don’t understand,” Aethe said.

“Neither do I,” Marco said. “Not really. Except for one thing. If he’s on this island and still getting stronger, that means his class is eating something. We need to find out what.”

—

Of all the things they could have spent their time on before they left to walk the island, finding a different, better bathtub than what they had access to so far was not what Marco had thought of as a top possibility. Aethe and Elisa, however, had said it was a necessary part of having the best chance of getting something out of the skill crystal. He was not at all sure he wasn’t being played, but he went along with it anyway. If nothing else, he got a bath out of it too, and if it kept the girls happy he wasn’t going to push back on it too hard.

After an hour of getting perfectly clean, Elisa sat in a fluffy chair with her feet up, wearing a very nice loaner robe. The owner of the bathing house had brought her some tea, which she sipped and sighed.

“There,” she said. “That’s about as relaxed as I’ll get.”

“And that will really help? You wouldn’t think it would be reliant on something like that. Most items from the system either work or don’t, and…”

“Marco?” Elisa interrupted, her eyes still closed. “Shh. You’re ruining it.”

She held her hand out, palm up, and motioned for Marco to hand her the crystal. He did. It glinted green in her hand. She turned it over and over for a few minutes, like she was getting to know it. All the time, she was sinking deeper into the overstuffed chair, breathing slower, and working herself into a state Marco would have mistaken for sleep if her hand had ever stopped moving.

Finally, slowly, she sighed. The crystal in her hand glowed for a moment before disintegrating into a pile of dull black powder. Marco held his breath.

“Wow,” Elisa said. “That’s a relief.”

“It worked?” Marco shot up out of his seat. “What did it do?”

“Hold your horses.” Elisa scribbled some notes in her book for a few seconds, her other palm up in a warding, please-wait position. “Here. Read it for yourself.”

Marco took the notebook from her hand and read the new note. To his great pleasure, he found out he shared her relief. It was better than he could have hoped.

Marco looked up from reading the message, which had actually taken much longer than Elisa had needed to write it. She laughed and handed him another piece of paper, this time torn loose from one of her many backup notebooks.

“Wow,” Marco said. “That’s a lot.”

“And that is why I never want you to argue with me when I need a bath again. Ever.”

“That’s too big of an ask,” Riv said. “Don’t do it, Marco. That’s too much power for any one person to hold.”

“He’s right,” Aethe said. “Elisa, we will demand baths together. As a team.”