Run, run, run... It'll never be far enough.

[Etheryn]

((Battle closed to Itera. In Dan's canon, this follows on from http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?24394-Groceries-The-Hard-Way&p=197731#post197731))

A seagull cawed and squawked and signalled the attack. It circled above and analysed the target zone with a not-so-good eye, and considered the solitary cutter—a sailboat with a single mast and mainsail—as it plod along the choppy leaden seas. The seagull knew not of the vessel’s proper name, or even what it truly was; only that someone served dinner from it. A wounded two legged animal belched up a feast.

The seagull bade its time and waited for backup from the rest of his flock before dive bombing into the messy chunks of salted mystery meat and mouldy bread afloat on the surface. The feeding started. Cacophony. Madness. Frenzy. The whitecaps of cresting waves and flapping gull feathers were inseparable.

“We’re getting close,” Dan said with aplomb, tying off a rope to steady the boom and make use of renewed winds. They were moving in good time. “These don’t go too far from shore. What do you think?”

“Hur-blurrrgh! Aaron answered. He’d been cripplingly ill for a full day now after eating something foul.

“Mmm, yes. Hur-blurgh,” Dan concurred, stroking his imaginary beard and nodding sagely. “Never seen birds so damn vicious as up here. Mustn’t get fed much.”

While Aaron continued sharing their quickly dwindling rations with the wildlife, Dan gripped a railing to keep steady and kneeled to pat Aaron on the back. Aaron brushed him off and took a deep breath.

“Kill me,” he said between spits and barely restrained hurls. “Kill me now.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Dan said, and with the great maw of his gloved palm gave Aaron a hearty slap on the back. Aaron’s vomiting fit redoubled. “You’ll grow sea legs soon enough.”

Aaron’s answer was a stiffly raised middle finger. Dan idled a moment, reassuring his brother with presence alone. The cutter rose and fall with the waves and sheets of spray stung them both. Aaron kept ushering Dan away with a shove, plainly embarassed of the inability to hold his stomach.

Dan left him to the misery, and stepped into the cutter’s cabin. On the way to the tiny doorframe, he stopped at the skipper's wheel, and spied a brief opening in the cloud cover. He caught a glimpse of stars, recognised the constellation, and affirmed their good heading. He spun the wheel a few times and was satisfied. It was an all-day twilight in these northern reaches, and even though the stars rarely peaked from behind the overcast, they were always there waiting to guide Dan's way.

“Get inside soon!” Dan reminded his older brother Aaron as he left the deck.

He shook off the chill and exhaled into the cup of his hands to warm up, rubbing palms and then exhaling more. The first thing to do once ashore was seek out warm clothes. They’d had time in Radasanth to prepare for a voyage but complications caused forgetfulness and the destination wasn’t set before departure. No one thinks about bringing a jacket when they’re busy thieving someone else’s vessel and fleeing.

Dan sat on a rickety three-legged stool and leaned his elbows on the skipper’s table, head cradled in his hands, and read notations by a lit candle that soon would be a stub in its brazier. With a quick arrangement of protractor and compass, Dan figured their arrival at an unnamed shoring bay on the western edge of Salvar would take a few days at most.

The issue with sailing open sea is that without landmarks, they had only stars and the sun as. When the overcast lasts for a week at a time, well, things got tricky. Once they made land it’d be a swift march to Knife’s Edge—at least that’s what Dan thought the maps read. It was becoming more guesswork and less certain by the day.

The plan seemed simple yet as the journey dragged on, new and more complexities multiplied like germs. Food was starting to become an issue, and there’s only so much salted herring and pan-fried dough one can eat before clogging their belly. With the creeping frost, rain was less frequent, and it getting common for the two rogue sailors to run dry of fresh drinking water for days at a time.

Dan flicked the bottom of Aaron’s packet of cigarettes and lit one up, clicking his jaw and rolling his tongue in frustrated attempt to blow a smoke ring. He just couldn’t master it and lazed on the stool, back against the spartan and windowless cabin wall, watching his exhalations form a soft haze at the ceiling. There wasn’t much to do. He considered the bare interior of the boat, the grubby floorboards, the splintering sidewall, the absent trappings or decorations. No trophy of long voyages, no mark of station. The cutter carried nothing apart from bare necessity. It stirred Dan's guilty conscience.

“Oi! Aaron!”

“What?” he shouted back from the deck, voice drained by a rising, eerie wail of breeze through the riggings.

“Did you pay enough for this?” Dan asked.

He’d never actually stolen something before, and really, the first occasion being something large as an entire boat was disconcerting. What made it worse was the plainness of the cutter itself told of a comparatively poor owner. The cabin was little more than a tiny rectangular box set into the hull with a lantern hook, a table, two hammocks and stools.

“Bloke would’ve been happy,” Aaron assured. “He could buy two of these for what I left behind.”

“You sound better,” Dan said.

“Jinxed,” Aaron said. “Here we go aga—

Dan shook his head when he heard a quick patter of footsteps rushing to the starboard bow, the flop of a sprawling man, and the raw-throated gargle of poor Aaron’s unsettled tummy. The seagulls continued to glut themselves. Dan spoke too soon.

Half an hour day-dreamed away, and Dan’s mind took him for a walk back to Corone. He saw things that’d already seen too many times before; a flaming carriage wreck in a muddy, dark forest; a pile of melted wax that closely resembled a person; a flaky iron door slamming shut on four walls of mildewed granite, bringing nothing but absolute dark and stifled sobs.

“Nowhere else in the world,” Dan mumbled aloud. There was almost nowhere else that could be further from it all. His spirit warmed at thought.

“Except Salvar,” Aaron said, flopping into a hammock and wiping spittle from his lip. “Nowhere else you’d rather be, right?”

“Something like that,” Dan said. “Are you alright?”

He eyed off his brother, trembling and pale with a dirty burlap sack drawn up for a shawl and stains coating the dyed black of his lamb’s wool jacket. Aaron’s denim trousers, grey and patchy, were bloused and tucked in the neck of double laced black combat boots. What would’ve been a lean warrior’s figure was slowly reducing to a malnourished frame of too much bone and not enough muscle.

“I’ll be fine, brother,” Aaron said. “It’ll pass.”

“No, man. You’re all drawn. Your little rat face is getting bonier than usual,” Dan quipped, standing up to toss over another empty sack for Aaron’s warmth.

“And you stink more than usual,” Aaron replied, throwing the burlap back to Dan. “Take a dip or something. Your smell is probably half the reason I keep throwing up.”

Dan lit a cigarette for Aaron and set it between his lips. “Tough bastard you are,” Dan said with affection, patting his older brother on the cheek.

For a moment they just looked upon the other. Dan standing above, Aaron cradled below in the hammock cloth, both absolutely quiet. They’d trudged through a slice of Hell together and high-water disease was still a real threat. Dan saw worry in place of usual calm alertness in Aaron's periwinkle blue eyes. Patches of grey forming at the temples, seeping age into the otherwise youthful blonde. Crows feet and wrinkles, all from frowns and none from smiles.

There wasn’t a chance one was willing to lose the other, after all the fighting and running and hiding and just-barely-living. Not to an overgrown aching belly.

“How far?” Aaron asked.

“Few days until land. After that… I’m not sure,” Dan answered.

He stood in the doorframe to the deck, once again checking over the riggings and knots, watching the straining cord on masts and hafts, and confirming their heading. The cutter kept on cutting on, the bow wedging through the endless waves. Things were alright.

“You grew big,” Aaron said, rolling to his side in the grubby bed cloth. He watched Dan’s muscular girth, that never seemed to waste no matter how little they ate. “Bigger than me.”

“I ate my damn vegetables when Mum told me to,” Dan said.

“Along with everything else in the house,” Aaron added. “Remember what we agreed on?”

“Yeah, I do. Go to sleep.”

Aaron slept, lullabied by the patter of sea spray and coo of ancient wind. Dan finished the cigarette. They didn’t talk about Mum and Dad any more.

Dan returned to the deck with glass lantern, huddling his shoulders into a burlap sack of his own and desperately wishing for a change of clothes. He clenched his fist, and saw the tension of muscle beneath the camouflage patterned leather bodysuit that kept him warm. Aaron was wearing an identical suit, and without it, both would’ve just frozen in the tattered clothing they wore overtop. Dan rolled down the sleeve of his stained tallow shirt, and tucked his olive drab overalls into his boots to ward off the chill.

Dan wasted time.

He opened a trapdoor in the deck and retrieved his weaponry, strapping it all on and testing the arrangement, quickly shooting a hand to each piece implement to know he had access in a hurry. He set the lantern on a hook, and practiced fighting off shadow assailants with a newly purchased and wholly untested combat knife. He beat down beasts with the brutal claw of a hammer. He produced a pistol crossbow, and loaded and reloaded and forcibly jammed and cleared, all over and over and over again, to make sure it worked when needed to. He exercised his will, catching sea spray in his father's leather pouch, and with his will amplifying the whitecap of a small wave into a turbulent geyser of foam.

The weight of steel in his hand was comforting and gave confidence, but Dan knew it more than most; weapons were useless against something so vast, devouring and indomitable as the frosty grey sea they sailed on now. It wasn't the point. He knew he could never beat the sea. He could never fight back if it decided to swallow them up. There wasn't even a chance. There was a chance, though, that he could defend himself when—not if, but when—someone sought to do him harm once more. Their bounty assured it would happen.

Dan and Aaron James, wanted enemies of the state, he thought. A bajillion gold coins for anyone who delivers them dead or alive to the Empire of Corone. Awesome.

"A bajillion? Come on, Dan. It'd be twenty thousand at most. A bajillion is not a number," Dan said aloud, mocking Aaron's voice in a nasally whine, as he feinted and ducked and carved great rips out of the air and dark.

Dan knew nothing of Salvar. He was afraid of what would lay in wait for him and his brother when they landed. The only thing to abate that fear—to settle his nerves that frayed at the thought of what came next—was practice. He continued in silence for hours, falling and rolling and almost going overboard on the slippery deck and swelling sea.

In all his occupation Dan failed to observe the new shape far on the murky, overcast dark of the horizon. An almost invisble pinprick of orange light. Even if he’d spotted it with a telescope the shape was too small to distinguish. An island or imagination? By Dan’s ignorance it mattered not.

[Itera]

When the cod boat had set out from port so many days ago, it was commandeered by a pair of large, menacing men who decided that a couple of fishermen where easier to intimidate than, say, an entire whaling brig. The four fishers were certainly easier to intimidate than their stalker, who had tagged onto them at some point in the city and wouldn't leave them alone. Initial suspicions that she was a competing bounty hunter trying to edge in on their chase ran into the trouble observation that she wore a mass of white-and-purple pleats and frills almost as conservative as a nun's habit, had a build which resembled a fighter's about as much as a pufferfish resembled a marlin, and has done nothing except smile encouragingly at them from a distance. Three times, Tanhab had tried to surprise her by running or by ambushing, but she always simply strolled around a corner and wasn't there when he arrived a moment later.

He glanced up at that. Sitting on the edge of the top and with her dress flying in the wind, she was actually pleasant to look at. The girl wasn't always there, though he hasn't seen her around the ship anywhere else. The crew was nervous, whispering that this was a ghost or apparition or banshee, but they dared not turn back to port because there were several sharp pointy things pointed their way in Tanhab's and Thovab's hands. Besides, there has been two times now when someone had climbed trepiditiously up the mast to change the stays, found the girl nowhere in sight, and came back down with a piece of cheese for a present. If this was a malevolent spirit dooming their ship to the sea, it was certainly a nice malevolent spirit.

Itera wasn't really a malevolent spirit. Mischevious, flighty, whimsical, uninhibited, and with a poor grasp of ownership, but not malevolent. She was out for a stroll along the wharves when she overheard two people hushedly discussing going to Salvar on a boat, the poor gents. That got enough of her interest to unilaterally tag along, because she's never seen Salvar before and she was bored. The ketch, Brazen Hussy, was fun to ride atop of for two days before she got bored again because there was nothing but sea and sky and birds and fish. Fortunately, the course of time conspired to entertain her.

She overheard a bit of conversation between the Brothers Fierce, whose whispered words at the bow were blown up to her ears by the wind. They were making a discussion of bounties and what they were planning to do once they caught up to... well, she missed the names. This was a new and interesting concept to Itera; it was like playing tag but, instead of the loser paying you the wager like back in Tenger Jerhal, someone else entirely paid you. It didn't make sense, but then again, there were a lot of things in this world that didn't make sense. Then she heard something else from the Brothers, something that made her positively giggle with amusement.

They thought that she was going to try to take their bounty and claim the money.

She wasn't. Now she was. Itera had no use for money, but this was something new to try, even if only once.

The brothers disappeared into the ocean one night and nobody heard of them ever again. The fishers were puzzled at first and happy minutes afterwards when a search of the boat turned up nothing. Tears in their eyes as they thought of worried family, they made to turn back the boat to home.

"Hello~"

As one, they recoiled away from the mainmast. Itera set foot on the deck for the first time, gently and unnecessarily fanning herself.

"Err, begone, ghost! Your hosts jumped overboard last night. You should follow them, right?"

"No~" She stretched the word out, grinning hugely, "We are still going to Salvar, yes?"

"What? No. We're going home."

"But if we don't go to Salvar, I might be upset." Itera carefully, quietly dumped an entire spinning sphere's motion into the fore staysail tack line, which unknotted itself in an instant and shot off to flail in the wind. She was still grinning as the boat griped horribly and the helmsman fought the rudder.

One short scuffle later, involving the eldest fisher dunked twice into the drink and recovered sputtering, the crew all agreed that they shouldn't upset the ship spirit. At least not while they're all by their lonesome out on the big, gray sea. This seems about to change.

"Light!"

"Where at?"

"Light two points starboard off the bow!"

There was a scuffle while the crew strained to see. Nobody was in the top because Itera was sitting there again, almost invisible beyond the gull-winged sails. She snapped out of her light doze and listened to the sailors, hoping that this was one of the ships that the bounty persons were supposed to be travelling in.

The Brazen Hussy came to the right as the crew tried to find someone else to perhaps foist the ship's ghost off on. Broad reaching like that, the ketch soon began to close the distance with the cutter. Itera, for her part, continued to lounge in the top and daydream of parties. It was like tag, right? All she had to do is ask nicely, or maybe tap them on the shoulder.

In the distance, a flat line of black clouds appeared in the sky.

[Etheryn]

Impatience tapped out of Dan’s foot as he leaned out of the cabin door to keep eyes on the closing vessel. Things happened slowly at sea; an assailant ship didn’t just surprise a lone victim. It followed, creeping up ever so slowly, closing in plain sight and threatening questions all the while. “What d’you reckon? No flag. Too small to be military. What do they want with us?”

Aaron was inside the cabin and facing away, huddled over an open trunk and quickly pulling a tattered combination of tunic and trousers and hide boots over his patterned leather sneak suit. “What they want with right now is irrelevant. What they want with us if they find out who they are, or don’t fall for our bluff, is what matters.”

“They’re not signalling,” Dan said. “I count four torches on deck but that doesn’t count men.”

“You’re the sailor,” Aaron replied while strapping a scabbarded falcata to his belt. “How many crew would be needed?”

“I don’t know, man. Four? Six? And are you going to be vomiting everywhere while you swing that?”

“That’s reasonable,” Aaron said with a self-assuring nod, pausing to swallow a mouthful of sick that'd just forced its way up by the swell of a rogue wave in the otherwise calm waters. "And yes, I am."

He stood up and faced Dan. There was pensiveness plastered over both their faces. Without other distraction for it, their base personality leaked into all of their actions and mannerisms and words weren’t needed for the brothers to convey their unsettlement. Aaron saw how Dan swapped between tapping his foot or fiddling with empty pockets, all indecisive and second-guessing himself about what they would do, then summarising the only thing needed was to brashly hammer anyone who tried to cross. Dan saw how Aaron chain smoked the last of their cigarettes, despite only recently assuming the habit, and tried to rationalise plans that were all limited by one inescapable factor; there was only finite surface area upon which they could manoeuvre.

Dan began a sentence, and stopped before the first syllable with his mouth half open. He didn’t believe what he thought to say. “Could just hide in here, wait for them to board, and…yeah. Hostages?”

Aaron stubbed his smoke on the wall and tossed the butt into an impressively filthy pile in the corner. He wasn’t one for mess, but their borrowed vessel wasn’t one with potential for radiant cleanliness. The grimy, oiled lacquer walls, scattered rolls of parchment with navigation charts and plots, and floes of melted candlewax running down the legs of the skipper’s desk were all testament to the time they’d spent at sea. “You’re kidding me.”

“We press the advantage. No one comes this far just to say hello to a stranger,” Dan said, and stroked and hand over the back of his head. He ducked out again briefly to look at the growing silhouette on their tail, and motioned for the telescope. Aaron found it collapsed and piled in a corner with a rusted sextant.

Dan pulled the eyeglass to length and squinted through it. “Especially not fishermen all the way from Radasanth port.”

“You recognise it,” Aaron said. He tapped the bottom of the cardboard cigarette packet, and frowned defeat when he found it empty. The stress level heightened.

“I’m fairly sure,” Dan said, pausing the eyeglass to check he still had weaponry strapped on and then resuming. “I saw it moored rows over from ours when we took it. There was some bug-eyed kid scrubbing out the cod holds and I was freaking that we’d been sprung. Remember?”

Aaron nodded, his memory clear. “That one with four sails and a smaller sail just in front of where the rudder should be. The kid was just looking at you, not shouting for guards.”

“It’s called a ketch. Either way, whoever is on board was sent by the owner of the boat we’re on now. Or, they know who we are and want to cash us in,” Dan reasoned. He collapsed the telescope and stepped back into the cabin. He slumped into a hammock and the stained canvas strained on rope and hook at his weight.

“Fishermen don’t chase bounties this far. Not because they don’t want the money. They just don’t want to tumble with people dangerous enough to have bounties,” Aaron replied. “It’s more likely the former.”

“But we left more coin than the boat is worth,” Dan said. “You did, right?”

Aaron nodded, momentarily pre-occupied by finding a half-finished cigarette in the fold of his own hammock. He fumbled and lit it graciously with a broken matchstick. “Maybe I short-changed him. I don’t know much about boats.”

Dan slapped his forehead, looked up to the salt-washed, mouldy timber ceiling, and sighed his complaint. “How much, brother?”

“Twenty-five hundred,” Aaron said.

“And there we go,” Dan said. “They’ve come to collect the other three quarters.”

Both were silent for stretched eternity. Their sails were set and hauling them along weakly in the slackening winds, and their cutter lagged and slowed until only minutes separated them from the encroaching ketch. Dan pre-empted the problem with a thud of his fist against cabin’s interior wall, slid from the hammock and tightened the strap of his knife sheath. “I’m throwing anchor and dropping the sails,” he said. “We’ll deal with them. If someone is going overboard I’m doing it from a steady platform.”

Aaron stood up and pulled on a scrappy jacket of some unknown woodland animal’s fur. “Alright.”

They breached the cabin into the frosty night, lantern dangled from one hand, the other strongly hauling about ropes and knots and clamps. Dan lugged the barnacled lead weight anchor into the depths, kicking at the thick braid line as it unspooled to make sure it came off evenly. By the time it was still, all that could be heard was the slap and gurgle of foam wash against the hull, the creak of timber and rusted joints, and the muffled syllables of the opposing ship’s crew pulling alongside.

“This is it,” Dan said to his brother, standing firm.

“It is,” Aaron replied, leaning casually against the cabin’s doorframe in a guise of cool composure; in reality he was dizzy and nauseous. “And stop standing like you’re about to tackle someone. You're making me edgy."

Dan felt absolute rigidity in his body. He looked down at this boots and found himself standing square, legs slightly apart, and fists balled at his sides, his posture suggesting whoever looked twice at him would be eating knuckle sandwiches. “Right,” he said, and exhaled long. It didn’t help.

The ketch outspanned the length of Dan and Aaron’s cutter by twenty feet. It was crewed well enough by four fishermen, bearded and wrinkled and dried like leather from exposure. They moved and worked with furrowed brows and with commanding calls to each other they came side-by-side to Dan and Aaron. It was an immediate standoff. There was no waving, no salute, no hoisting of flags or introductions shouted over the gap as the crew of “Brazen Hussy” laid out boarding planks and unfurled clinch ropes to bind both vessels together.

Dan assumed his brother’s examining posture and folded arms, leaning against the foremast. He considered the sensation of his own musculature tight inside his clothes, and the wrap of his leather gloves around his golf ball sized knuckles. He was big enough to handle them. One by one, he offered up his most menacing, most “come-near-me-and-I’ll-gut-you” glare to each of the four crewmen. Each dropped eye contact. They lacked conviction, spirit, even willingness; something was off.

“You’d think those on a righteous voyage to reclaim a friend’s property would be a little happier to catch up,” Aaron said, looking from the aft cabin end to Dan at the foremast. The length of the deck separated them. It was an unspoken plan to avail more ground to fight and manoeuvre should it become necessary.

“You would think they’d be armed, too,” Dan said, noticing the comparison of his own pistol crossbow, combat knife and hammer against their assortment of filleting knives and gaff hooks in disarrayed wood blocks on the decking.

“This isn’t quite right,” Aaron said.

“I've got three,” Dan said, ignoring Aaron’s implication to settle. "You take the other. You're not well."

“Hold on, brother,” Aaron persisted, holding up the palm of his hand for emphasis. The ambient noise of their vessel’s meeting, added to by the grind of both hulls making contact, drowned out their commentary on the lacklustre advance of the four fishermen.

Dan pressed the advantage of their meekness. He disagreed with Aaron and raised his voice to be heard. “Come aboard, gentlemen! I dare you!” Dan boomed.

Aaron’s expression dropped gaunt and he felt for the comforting hilt of his falcata in the dark, looking to the static twinkle of moon and stars above and sending a prayer skyward. It wasn’t for safety or deliverance, but for his brash and impatient sibling to learn some tact. “Really Dan?”

[Itera]

Aaron's skywards look went across exactly the right place. He saw something that was almost entirely obscured by the other ship's main top headsail earlier, before the vessels came together and the fishermen had struck their sails. He blinked and looked again at the Brazen Hussy's maintop.

Underlit from the torches below, skirts fluttering gently in the dying wind, there was a blond girl with a closed pink parasol tipped against her right shoulder and hiding half of her face with the fan in her left hand. Her white-and-purple getup was all pleats and frills and looked like it belonged at a ball for socially conservative people, rather than out at sea in what was quickly becoming an incredibly inept and possibly contagious attack of pirates. Those striking amber eyes glittered down at Aaron with something like amusement. It wasn't hostile amusement like a hungry bear watching a baby seal trying futilely to toddle away. It was more like as if the bear was full and was just seeing what the seal would do. This was probably hostile in its own manner, but that's a topic for legislatures to decide.

Dan was still staring at the fishermen, picking out his three intended victims. This was a bit more troublesome than usual because there wasn't a single one of them who looked like they had any fight left in them. The ones in the bow, then, because they were closer. In his mind, Dan calculated the three steps and a light jump that he would need to take, a moment after firing his crossbow into the chest of the one all the way on the right, to get close enough to strike down the second one. The sea was calm. There wasn't even any need to watch the waves and time the rise and fall of the two ships, which is fortunate as far too many otherwise competent warriors have drowned to their deaths after barking their shin on the gunwales.

In the distance, little flashes of white light became visible as the black line of clouds rolled in from the west. It was still probably half an hour away, but already the oncoming squall line had sucked all the life out of the winds. Soon the winds will reverse as the updraft came closer.


"I haven't got all day! Come-"

"Dan." Aaron's interruption came a little too quietly. He took his eyes away and looked down at the fishers, just in case they actually did manage to make half an effort at attacking and resolve the whole uneasiness resting in his belly like a lamprey. No such luck.

"-on! Which one of you is first?"

Itera looked down thirty feet to the top of the heads of the two men without the haunting ghost problem. The big, loud one was particularly noticeable from up here; his head had a gleaming pate that fairly shone in the weak light. They were undoubtedly armed, possibly half-angry, and likely prone to resolving tricky puzzles with steel. She scrunched her nose; it had been a pleasant few days to be able to go without that smell nearby; everything on a sea-going ship was brass or bronze or copper because the ocean was simply full of the death of iron. She turned a few thoughts over in her head and, with the slightest movement of the fan in her hand, opened a half-inch hole through space. The tiny, purple-lined thing appeared two feet over Dan's head. One second later, its other end appeared right in front of the fairy.

"Dan, stop shouting for a second and look at their mainmast." Aaron fought down the temptation to edge his falcata out of its sheathe. "Just... look."

"Ah, are you two be bound for Salvar?" This was a rather stupid question that the fisherman had asked. There wasn't anything along this course except for Salvar, unless maybe Dan had been possessed to sail out into the middle of the ocean, spin around a couple of times, and sail to somewhere completely different. One might say that this very closely describes what patrols in the navy do all the time, so perhaps they're all crazy.

A long moment passed like Friday night's ale on Saturday morning. Aaron didn't answer; he was walking through all the possible reasons like the world's third-greatest lover in a nunnery. Trouble is, his brain came out just as discombobulated as the nunnery. So he went for something decidedly safe, "Maybe. Why?"

Dan finished looking up at the apparition casually sitting up there and brought his eyes back down. The fishers hadn't moved, so the entirety of his previous plotting remained. However, now it may required shooting the girl first to see if she bleeds. If she bleeds, he can kill her and all was well. If not, well, then there would probably be some bother coming from that.

"Well, we've got a... a... pass-er-ger who'd like to go to Salvar. Very much. And we, umm.. we... we..." The fisherman wilted under Dan's renewed glare and stuttered into silence. Discounting the palpable clouds of the smell of long-dead cod wafting over from the other ship, there was something fishy about all this. Dan patted his crossbow to check that it was loaded and to make sure that everyone else saw that it was loaded.

"No."

The fisher winced and made a sort of mumbling noise.

"This ship isn't taking passengers and it sure won't start now. If that's everything, why don't you go and shove off?"

Itera's voice issued from a point a few feet above and a few inches behind Dan. It was a slow, silvery sort of sound; like a largo played with just the strings and one set of chimes. A voice like that could prounounce anything and have it sound airy and lazy. If it commanded a battalion of soldiers to duck they wouldn't have moved in time to avoid a shower of arrows fired by archers who have yet to get up, dress, have breakfast, read the morning paper, and pick up their weapons.

"You're bounties, aren't you~?"

Dan muttered under his breath, "Knew it!" Suddenly, his crossbow was in his hands, his finger feeling the cold iron of the trigger and the bolt-feather aiming up at the white-and-purple.

"Those four are probably faking it." Aaron slid his falcata out with a barely audible hiss, "Watch their hands!" His feet slid apart just a little further, for balance, as he edged up close enough to reach anyone trying to run down the plank.

THUD.

A crossbow bolt dove out of the air and buried itself into the deck right next to Dan's foot. His brain was still working out what had happened when the rest of him snapped into long practiced motion and squeezed the trigger. The crossbow went off with a resonant snap.

Itera saw the crossbow bolt exit the distal portal and almost shoot Dan in the foot. That was all the warning that she needed. Her smile quivered a little behind the fan as the fan twitched and her speaking-hole expanded into a full rift diameter, becoming a purplish circle in front of her. Then Dan's crossbow fired and the bolt disappeared into the rift, its whistle cut suddenly short.

The fairy was surprised.

[Etheryn]

Dan darted away from the reversed trajectory of his shot, hopping on one foot like the other was bare on hot sand. He puzzled at what happened and counted the fired three of his twelve bolts as traitors, deciding to swap teams and turn mid-air to streak back at him. Peculiar wasn’t the word; it would better describe the fashion sense of the “passenger” and her manner of speaking.

Aaron’s unintentional dichotomy described it best. “Fantastic,” he groaned, glancing cautiously at a feathered length buried in the cabin wall to which he pressed his back. It was too close to his neck and he was still like one goes when faced with an unpredictable dog, fearing any sudden movements might cause the bolt to remove itself and correct its aim.

Dan’s kohl black combat knife was halfway from its forearm scabbard before he reconsidered the intention to end the fishermen. They cowered at the streaking bolts. One, a wiry man turned to jelly at the knees, his shaggy brown mop of hair matted to his face in sweat, was folding both arms to protect his head against whatever may come against him. Another was holding a gaff hook because he had nothing else to do with his frantically shaking hands, until he thought better to toss it aside, giving fleeting looks to the oil black sea like it was a better option. The other two, one hirstute and round and the other younger and whippy, fixed on whatever spirit rode the mast, barely even paying attention to the James brothers. The bigger threat was clear to them. Like he’d been possessed to do it the fisherman with shaggy brown hair dove into the sea with a tiny splash and dunk. He was quiet and gone and no flailing drowner bobbed up to call for help. He was simply vanished, perhaps frozen stiff by the dunk.

“Do what you can to leave them unharmed,” Dan said to Aaron. “I don’t think they’re in this willingly.” In a deft movement he reloaded the crossbow with a plynt-tipped bolt and loaded his thaumaturgic pouch with one offcut shard of the same flammable metal.

Aaron rose on the balls of his feet and bounced like a boxer fresh for first bout. His head swam sympathetically with his rising heart rate. It was time to move. He considered the hovering disc of violet, ethereal matter shielding the spirit and in it he could see a clouded windowpane view of his own head from top down. He feinted to one side and the image, wobbling and shifting like heat waves, copied him. It was a bizarre illusion and the how of it needed too much time to solve. “Lose the shooting,” he advised Dan.

Dan wordlessly holstered his weapon and surged across the gangplank to the other vessel like a two-legged bull. He couldn’t figure out what came next, and simply bowled the older, hook-wielding fisherman out of the way with a shoulder charge and flattened him in to a heap of torn denim overalls and sweaty undershirt. The fisherman scrambled up and secured his weapon to prod its bloody barb at Dan threateningly, who feinted back and flung an elbow at another fisherman—the younger wrapped in fur scraps and a beanie—on the way.

It missed and Dan was surrounded. Aaron crossed to the ketch with less grace than usual by his sickness and ducked an overhand swipe from the third fisherman, the one bearded and gruff and the senior of the crew, who’d become incensed at seeing his mates struck. Dan was doing his best to weave away from erratic gaff hook sweeps and taking jabs in the kidneys and back of the head all the while. Soon, the younger fisherman clambered to his back and wrapped a tight forearm around his throat. Dan felt the squeeze and dropped to one knee quick as he could, rotating his hips and turning a shoulder down to dislodge him. It didn’t work and ink swirled at the edges of his vision.

Aaron juked under another yawing swing and came up with a sharp, snapping strike of his falcata’s hilt to the lower jaw of the bearded fisherman, whose head snapped back and lolled unconscious. His figure collapsed all bent onto an open crate of sinkers and frayed netting, one leg twitching a little. All the while, as he stepped to ease Dan of the younger fisherman clenching him, Aaron locked eyes with the oddly dressed figure at crown of the mainmast. It watched in subdued amusement, not by the violence, but curious of the speed in which men resorted to it.

The shimmering violet window drawn before the spirit still offered a view of the shadowed decking of their own cutter. Melding the three actions into one movement, Aaron forced a front kick into older fisherman’s stomach after deflecting a swing of the gaff hook, disarmed him of the weapon by wrenching it up, and flung it hard at the portal.

Dan dislodged the grappler on his back and shoved him into the now weaponless older fisherman. Dan's knife flashed from its scabbard and gripped reverse in his meaty paw, and his threatening shout for the attackers to quit lost its strength when he saw the spirit weave a wonder. A humming sound preceded the appearance of a second, smaller disc, and Dan saw puffy motes of regal purple spiralling off it like its perimeter rotated slowly. It was directly above Aaron and deposited the entire length of the gaff hook he’d thrown into the other portal onto his head, which promptly exploded into stars. He sagged and staggered.

Whatever goes into one of them comes out of the other, Dan thought.

The affray rolled on while the spirit observed. Dan warned with pulled flicks of his knife and stomping advances that rattled the planks, never quite closing with the unarmed fisherman who huddled shoulder by shoulder at the tapering of the ketch's bow. They didn’t want to tussle with Dan and he didn’t want to cut them, and as they stared each other down—Aaron joined Dan’s side on wobbly legs, focusing more on the bemused thing above—a realisation spread across both parties.

“Is this necessary?” Aaron said.

“I dun’ wan’ ta anger her!” the older fisherman said. “But I dun’ wan’ ta anger you lot either!”

A splitting crack filled the air some moments after a flash of white lightning carved the sky, breaching out of an advancing front of storm clouds in veiny tendrils. The younger fisherman yelped, not from surprise but the belief the spirit was responsible. “See what she does!?”

Dan fixed on the perched figure, made subtly dramatic and evil by the staccato strobing of the swelling, angry sky. The loneliness of the situation, the beginnings of howling wind, the unexplainable feats by which the spirit—he still didn’t know her name—moved things between two points without touching them; they were the openings of ghost stories. She contrasted to the darkness, all dainty in flapping skirts and colourful umbrella and spread fan, and twisted the two groups of unwilling men against each other if not by intention then by the confusion aroused in her sheer presence.

“What are you?” Dan bellowed, head on a swivel between the fishermen and her. He was standing at the base of the mainmast and to crane his neck up and past the sails. “And if I tell you to leave, will you do it? Or will you force these men onto us by your stubbornness?”

Aaron caught a glimpse of his own fear in the mirror of his whippy falcata, illuminated by a pulse of lightning. He saw paleness and wrinkles and out-of-focus eyes all bloodshot and glassy. He’d stood up to big, angry men, and lots of them at that. He knew how to deal with them: sharp end in the belly and they bleed and stop moving. It was simple. His confidence waned at the notion of poking his sword at an unknown creature that could be of Heaven or Hell or some other world, and then finding himself skewered by his own thrust.

Something materialised behind the heads of the brothers James. It carried the being’s drawling opiate voice. “Let me think…”

[Itera]

Maddeningly long seconds passed while Itera thought on the excellent and pertinent questions that the big, bald one had bellowed up towards her. The two ships, swinging by a single hawser at the bow, turned around completely in the wind and faced into the coming sea. Mist started spraying up the bows with each striking wave. She idly rolled her parasol as if the dark sky wasn't quickly becoming completely pitch-black and the wind rising to a howl.

"I think you're brave for asking me. Brave and unreasonable. Should I just jump overboard? I would get wet." Her voice still came through perfectly clear despite the din. "There were two big men who was on this ship before. They made the crew sail after you for the bounty. I just wanted to ride along but they were so unreasonable about it."

Dan noted the distinct lack of more traditional bounty hunters of the big, angry, dislikes-sharp-end-in-the-belly kind. He eyed the two remaining fishermen, whose faces were going even whiter than before as they recalled something. A crack of thunder briefly deafened ears.

"So I dropped them in the ocean." Itera's fan slammed closed, the sound of it coming from both the tiny rift behind the brothers and from high overhead. Her revealed smile was pleasant, as if she had just talked about a nice novel rather than cold-blooded murder. It simply didn't occur to the fairy to actually care about people whom she's just met and whose names she didn't remember because that was just the way that things were in Tenger Jerhal.

"What are you? What do you want?" Dan repeated himself, edging closer to a line to hold on in case that the spirit suddenly decided that she, too, wants to drop him in the ocean. If one of those discs appeared right under his feet- Dan glanced down involuntarily, noticing Aaron do the same out of the corner of his eyes.

"I want to get to Salvar, of course. Bounty hunting sounded so fun, I want to give it a try, too. Let's be reasonable~" Itera drawled out that last word. She still didn't answer the problem of who or what she was. Names have power and she hadn't survived to become a greater fairy while giving away power at the drop of a hat. Speaking of drop...

Aaron's head was starting to clear up from that solid thump. He had been glancing alternately between the mast spirit and the fishermen, but then saw her vanish her fan. One moment it was there, the next moment it had been pushed into a little purple disk. Instead, she now had a small reed handbasket from which she scooped a handful of dark red berries and a small metal ball. The inch-wide ball gleamed brightly in the darkness.

"We'll play to three hits. If I win, you come with me to Salvar and I turn in your bounties."

Dan paused. There wasn't a bounty for him in Salvar, at least, not one that he was aware of. He exchanged a look with Aaron, who was also coming up with a blank as to who would possibly want him in Salvar. Rain started pelting down diagonally. Itera's parasol opened and she braced it against the mast, her shoulder, and one hand to withstand the winds.

"And if you lose?"

"Then I come with you to Salvar." The fishermen below sagged in sudden relief. One way or another, they'll be free to go home soon, provided that they survive the storm and the battle.

"It seems unfair..." Aaron ventured, looking at the rippling purple disc still hovering in front of the spirit and remembered throwing a gaff hook onto his own head. With her sitting dozens of feet up, the challenge did seem rather unfair. With the ships now rolling and pitching in the storm waves, the driving rain and winds, and her mysterious protection, it outright seemed impossible to actually hit.

"That's what it is~" The rift in front of Itera rotated in on itself, flipping side-for-side. Dan saw only black clouds on the side facing him now, which means-

He dove across the rocking deck, his chin getting a nick on an exposed copper nail as the ship rose on a wave. Behind him, the suddenly-expanded window above spat out a handful of berries to smash colorfully into where he was a moment ago. As if to reinforce his intuition, he could see a shadow dry of rain beneath the violet window and there was horizontal rain flying out of the one in front of the fairy. So, these things were two-sided, Dan thought.

Aaron thought faster than his brother did. He ran in and looked up into the window. There she sat, her hazy image apparently only a foot away, already reaching into her basket for another handful. It was close enough. He stabbed up and in with his falcata and was rewarded with a choked scream.

The rifts collapsed, Aaron pulling his arm back in time to not get... whatever it was that the purple border did to things when they closed on them. A few strands of severed blond hair came out after him, blowing away immediately in the wind. The blade was still clean.

"Think that counts as one?" Aaron asked, his clothes and hair matted onto him but his smile absolutely huge.

Dan looked at Aaron, looked at Aaron's weapon, then looked up at the distant spirit, who had taken off her slashed-open mob cap and was looking at it in open shock. He thought he could make out tears, but perhaps it was just rain. Dan got out the crossbow again and took aim at the purple center of the white dress. He reached out to the pouch and prepared to see if a fire would hold in the storm.

"Yeah. Do it again if she tries again. My turn." This was going to be easy. The fishermen had already run under for their oilskins, so just stop the spirit and they can hack off the lines connecting the ships.

CRACK

A flaming crossbow bolt burned a bright trail towards Itera. Her hair flew wild without her cap in place, but she saw the bolt just fine. She reached for the Boundary of Motion and Stillness, grasped it, and pulled as hard as she could. The bolt slowed, stopped, and for a moment hung still in midair as it had a confused existential moment about what it was supposed to do. Then gravity glanced sharply in its direction and the flaming bolt fell onto the furled main top staysail of the "Brazen Hussy". It was the same sail that was rolled up around a pitch-soaked line.

[Etheryn]

The bolt caught the staysail and its burning tip ate a widening hole into it that eventually spread patchy fires. Dan knew the shot may be redirected at the time of making it, but couldn’t have known the rope binding the staysail was saturated in the same tar and resin used for caulking between planks of ketch’s decking. As the sail's holes spread wide enough to touch it, the rope flared like detonation cord and oily flame surged blue and bright red along its length. The loose end dangled and flapped down the mast and conducted fire to the other sails, and gusts of wind from the approaching storm front were bellows on tinder.

“Shit,” Dan cursed as the bonfire illuminated the scene. He holstered the crossbow switched back to the knife. “This isn’t working!”

Aaron couldn’t decide where to focus. Too much stimuli occupied his attention, and his feet were unsure by knowing that a purple wormhole could open beneath and fell him. He retreated aft from the radiating heat caused by Dan’s missed shot and came shoulder to shoulder with the two fishermen he’d been struggling against earlier. One of them slipped on the cold spray sluiced on the floorboards which reflected white splits of thunderbolts and the skeletal frame of the mast and its crossbars turning black in the draping fire consuming the sails. Aaron offered a hand to help him up.

“T-t-hanks! I-I…I don’t want to fight!” the younger fisherman said.

Aaron motioned to the bearded heap he’d knocked unconscious not moments earlier, and then motioned to the cutter. “Take him!”

Dan glared at his brother, shielding his face from the heat waves with his blade arm and coughing on the taste of singed fibres. “Are you serious?”

“They’re not in the fight,” Aaron said. “Don’t you see what brought them here?”

Dan accepted Aaron’s point. He grit his teeth and struggled for a tactic. There’d been battles where he found himself cornered with no choice but to charge head on and clear a path through ranks of men. It was most reckless but there was assuredly a way to break each of them down; a wristlock to force one into submission; a hammer blow to the ribs to take their breath away; a stab in the shoulder to turn sword arms flaccid. Those experiences were somewhat useless now, as it wasn’t just muscle and sinew he fought. It was a nameless mystery that jumbled the simplest facts of the world. What once went up and came down now went up and sideways and collapsed on itself and returned upside down to where it came, all through the space bending portals.

Three hits is all, he repeated internally. He knew what to do.

Aaron saw droplets from intermittent pulses of horizontal rain catch in a slow rotating column around each of Dan’s limbs, floating in irregular spheres and wobbling shapes, trapped by the force accrued around his body. The storm rolled nearer and loomed higher and the frequency of the rain falls increased until suddenly ceasing with a slackening of the gales. The mast and sails were still flaming, albeit slightly soothed by the precipitation. Pressure built in the air and everyone’s ears popped. The splinter in Dan’s pouch was a conduit for his unleashed will, and with a symbolic clap of the hands the weakened spire of the mast burst into a cloud of embers and charcoal shards that left hissing trails of steam and smoke like the glowing fragments of a spent firework.

Aaron rolled out of the way to avoid a lumpy piece that crashed heavily to the deck and scattered crates and barrels. In the exaggeration of his movement found himself tipped over the gunnel and dangling by one hand to frayed cargo netting. His free hand didn’t feel right, and he looked to find the falcata had been dropped somewhere during the dodge.

The rain returned in a downpour. It hammered the deck loudly and stung with cold and speed of falling. Dan shielded his eyes with a hand and wasn’t aware of how close his brother was to falling to the arctic waters. He was assessing the result of his spell and hoping for strike two. He’d put a violet portal between himself in the mast, and focused the epicentre to send the majority of the debris through that portal and at the same spirit, while at the same time shielding him from it.

Aaron tried to pull up. He couldn’t. He shouted and flailed with no result, and the grip of his right arm waned. Something poked him in the calf. He looked down, and found the shaggy mop headed fisherman—the one who’d gone overboard earlier—clinging to the lower half of the cargo net. The fisherman raised a finger to his lips and nodded knowingly at Aaron like he’d planned to be there all along.

[Itera]

Flip went the portal. Itera wasn't laying back and taking things as they come anymore. They had slashed her hat, and that meant serious business. She had stood up. She had closed her parasol, finally letting the rain soak her. The image of some angered and terrifying spirit would be complete if it wasn't for the part where she still had a smiling, amused expression on her face rather than some sort of twisted visage of rage.

The oncoming storm of flaming wooden splinters vanished into the rift that Dan had gotten in front of him. They emerged from the other end a moment later, spitting and steaming through the air, but Itera had already flipped her side, so instead they sprayed out in a slim cone away from her. It would have rained down on the cutter and made life a bit unpleasant, but there was something immensely distracting to Itera at the moment. Namely, the ketch mainmast was on fire and falling while she was still standing in the top.

The splinters flew out to sea, lost instantly into the wind, rain, and general darkness.

The portal in front of Dan moved, floating upwards towards the cutter's mast and top. A moment later, Itera hopped free of the falling, flaming mast of timber, rope, and sail and stepped onto the cutter's mast, above Dan.

Dan was starting to get just a little more familiar with the mysterious power that he was facing. He shouted, "Up there!" and in one movement drew and threw a small rigging knife. It wasn't balanced for throwing, would probably hit handle-first, and was already starting to wobble disconcertingly in the gusting wind. It was still a better thought than throwing his combat knife, though, and the lighter weapon would reach further up the mast.

"Aaron...?" Dan called when he didn't hear an answer. He wanted to look around but the knife was almost there... almost there...

The deck heaved underfoot, throwing Dan to his knees. There was an almighty splintering crash as a great wave smashed into the ketch alongside, washing green water right across its deck, and driving its hull into the cutter's. On the other side of the ship, Aaron lost feeling in his hand as the net cut into it during a desperate bid to hold onto the heaving ship. The man below him momentarily lost grip of one hand before recovering.

But the knife, which had been blown well off-course before hitting Itera, was suddenly aimed correctly again as the cutter's mast gyrated wildly and brought the fairy into the path. It gently scratched her in the side and then plunged out to sea. She suddenly collapsed in a shivering heap, rolling against the rail.

Light or not, scratch or not, the knife was still an iron blade. The wound burned with white-hot pain. It was hard to breathe. Her side spasmed in agony underneath a soaked dress very slowly being stained pink from the tiny little trickle of blood. All of the portals vanished.

One of the two fishermen who had ducked into the hold of the cutter came running back topside, "Hull's stoved in! Ship's taking on water fast! Six inches already!"

[Etheryn]

The storm went from bad to worse. The distraction of conflict let it swoop up and over them with deceptive speed, and they suffered the wrathful consequence of ignoring its rumbling threats on approach. Their battle was forgotten: before, Dan and Aaron fought against the spirit and the fishermen fought against being involved. Now, with one vessel hamstrung by a blasted mast and the other wounded to fill and sink in the churning sea, they all fought for the same thing. Survival.

Gentle raindrops were now stinging buckshot and blurred Dan’s vision. He couldn’t hear over the storm’s baying howl and white noise of crashing waves that tipped him at forty-five degree angles to roll and slide over the slicked deck, crashing into the gunwale and cascading back to the other as the ketch was thrown about in the waves.

“Aaron!” he shouted. The mystery of the ocean spirit and her contest to three hits didn’t interest him in the slightest now. What did was the absence of his brother. He scanned in every direction for a glimpse of soggy blonde hair and saw only the spirit reeling with pain—surprisingly, his thrown knife had a bloodless effect—and the band of fishermen barking to each other and doing all they could to brave the storm.

A bloodied hand, knuckles popped white, clawed with desperation for grip on the gunnel. Another joined it. Dan locked on and slid on his backside to help, propelled by the inertia of the waves and balanced by planting his palms on either side. A vicious crack of lightning streaked overhead, and in the greyscale light Dan found Aaron struggling alongside the shaggy haired fisherman, both barely holding on to the cargo netting that hung like a curtain over the ketch’s hull. Aaron slipped when a whitecap slammed him face first into the hull, and entered into a life debt when the shaggy haired fisherman caught him by the collar and clung on for dear life.

Dan hooked one hand into a carabina bolted to the gunnel, stretched out and offered the other rescue to the fisherman, whose face was contorted in effort, teeth almost shattering against each other in gnashing cries for help. He wouldn’t let Aaron, a stranger to him, be taken by the sea. It was a sailor’s code. Dan’s grip crushed around the whole of the fisherman’s forearm. “What’s your name?” he shouted.

“Gareth!”

“I won’t let you go!” Dan promised. With a full body heave, he lifted the combined weight of Gareth and Aaron with assisting momentum of the ketch's roll in the other direction. Their saturated and almost hypothermic bodies soared over head, a three link human chain whipped by Dan’s strength. They landed in and exhausted sprawl and Gareth’s still held stiffly to Aaron’s unconscious frame.

In all the franticness Dan lost focus of the spirit. He saw her shape recoiling and almost recovered from whatever pain the earlier glancing knife strike caused. Somehow, against all the drama around, she looked amused and ready to resume indulgence of her game to three hits. The spreading shape of a portal appeared near Dan and sprayed torrents of rain and sea in directions opposite to their origin.

Dan boiled with righteous anger. The spirit’s playfulness was reckless to the lives of men. He committed to destroy it, as he’d always done to things that made him mad. The portals were his only option. He didn’t know how or if it could be done or where he’d end up, but he had to try. He threw his whole body between the circumference of the portal’s disc and felt the electric sensation of every particle of his being ripping apart to reassemble at the portal’s other side and directly beside its creator.

He tackled her with all two hundred pounds of his weight, anchored by gravity, and ripped her down from her lofty height. Dan was numb with cold and couldn’t feel the sudden stop of impact on the cutter’s deck. The two fishermen who’d retreated to the cutter’s deck earlier had to scatter to avoid entanglement in the affray. Dan’s forearm, thick and hard like an oak table leg, sought to crush the spirit’s throat and silence her for the delivery of a final warning. Her skin, if it could be called that, sent a buzzing current through Dan when the contact was made.

“I don’t give a fuck what you are,” he bellowed, face inches from her’s so she would hear his voice over the storm’s. Spittle flew from his lips. “You will help, or you will die and go back to where you came, or vanish into a puff of pretty fucking smoke and confetti. I promise you—I will find out what happens when you expire.”

Dan prayed his bluff wouldn’t be called. Gareth knew something he didn’t, and bunched a cast net weighted with iron sinkers into a weedy ball. He pegged it in tall arc from the ketch to the cutter, and his companion fishermen unravelled it and held the span between them.

“Use it!” Gareth shouted.

[Itera]

Stunned and disoriented by the long, unexpected fall, Itera gave no answers to Dan for a handful of seconds while her eyes rolled around of no-one's accord. When she finally focused onto Dan, she blinked her faintly luminous amber eyes, smiled, and held up a hand. It had three fingers extended.

She didn't say anything. Of course she couldn't, because there was Dan's arm across her throat. The storm drowned out any choking sounds, but Dan somehow figured that when the spirit's arm fell back down and the eyes again started rolling white, it was probably time to let back a little. He did. Then someone tapped him on the shoulder.

"We've got a net!" A fisherman shouted into his ear.

"Can't risk it!" Dan shouted back while Itera gasped and panted, "If I let go she'll just disappear!"

"She'll just take you with her if you don't! Drown you in the drink!"

"Then I'll kill her!"

"Put a line on it and secure it!" Aaron shouted, shuffling up shivering and hanging onto a stay. The fishermen gingerly moved around the pitching, rolling deck into Dan's view, grabbing hold of the flailing flying jib sheet - the flying jib itself was nowhere to be seen - and fasting it to the net in their hands.

"No! I-" Itera started protesting. Then Dan bodily lifted her and rolled her into the net. There was a short whimper as the iron weights closed around her. Sailors were unsurprisingly good with knots, fishermen were unsurprisingly good with nets, and in very short order there was a fishnet bag with a girl in it.

There were four of them, but the ship was also foundering in a very black squall. This worked out to be about even and it took almost a minute to haul the bag down into the black, unlit hold. It smelled horrible; the bilge had flooded out and was spread evenly over the foot-deep, rapidly rising water. The sounds of the storm roared outside and could not conceal the distinct sound of the sea rushing in from sprung planks somewhere else in the darkness. Itera made a soggy splash when Dan tossed her down from the ladder.

"Drain it!"

"I- I can't!"

"You will, or I'm going to shove this knife right down your throat!"

"The iron-"

"It's iron all right. Now drain the hold!"

"I can't! The iron! It's so close!" Itera curled there in the black water, illuminated only in flashes of lightning. Aaron squeezed past down into the hold, carrying a length of hawser looped over his shoulder. He shouted something inaudible back at Dan and motioned him to follow. The fishers followed, too, if only to get out of the rain and spray for a moment.

The water was twenty inches deep by the time they undid the net. One fisherman, Lerch, took the moment to give the spirit a solid, well-deserved kick.

"Bitch."

The water was two feet deep by the time Itera was solidly lashed to the mainmast in the hold. She didn't need another word, simply sniffed, and a man-sized whirlpool appeared in the middle and lowest part of the hold. Water fell into it with a tremendous gurgling noise. All four men scrambled up to the sides to avoid the sudden flow.

Gareth looked in from the hatch, "Storm's slack'n, but 's going to be a long blow. Brazen Hussy's all batt'n'd an' I shipp'd th' old man up th' cab'n. How's th'... oh." He noticed the whirlpool in the hold, saw the soggy girl on the mast, and came to his own conclusions. A grin shy a few teeth broke out.

Lerch dug around in the hold and came up with a short length of chain, "Doesn't like iron, does she?"

[Etheryn]

Aaron was blue lipped and shaking from his dip in the cold sea. The chill set in his bones was more than a fleeting discomfort; he was already ill and hypothermia compounded the issue. Dan sent him to the cutter’s cabin, guiding him by the arm to aid the wobbling zigzag of his steps. “I’ll be in soon as I can. Get some rest,” he said.

“You’re telling me to sleep with that thing still around?” Aaron protested.

“I know how to handle it. Gareth told me,” Dan replied, unsure if he was about to believe his own words. “She’s a… Er, she’s a fairy. Iron hurts and she’s surrounded by it.”

Aaron turned and quirked a sceptic eyebrow. He swayed and looked like death warmed up, face just about as skeletal. “You’re serious.”

Dan scavenged every piece of fabric that was dry and unbuckled a chest stuffed with folded clothes. “I am. Now get warm before I smack you upside the head.”

Aaron set his falcata close by, removed the sodden mess of blood and sweat and seawater that was his tunic, and hopped one legged out of his trousers after prying his boots off by the heel. The tight one piece of his full body leather sneak suit remained, and it was by its insulating properties alone that he hadn’t frozen to death already. He flopped on the hammock and passed out. Dan swaddled him in blankets and set a tin of tobacco and sheath of papers close by for when he woke.

Dan braced himself in the cabin doorframe and called out to Gareth, who was propped over the open hatch and speaking to Lerch down below. “Everything alright?” Dan said.

Gareth gave a thumbs up. It was good enough for Dan. He crossed over to the ketch, stepping over remnants of the amputated stump of the mast, and checked on the other half of the crew. Two hops over short steps and a slide a latch opened the stained timber of the cabin door, which squeaked open loud enough to announce his presence over the dwindling breath of the storm.

Bandages spotted with blood wrapped around the old man’s head. He sat on an upturned crate at a line reel turned on its side for a table, lines of cards arrayed in front of him with most face down. He combed a solution from the forest of his beard. “Good hit,” he said. “Last time anyone cracked me that hard I was wearin’ a soldier’s uniform.”

Dan sat quietly on a crate of his own and watched him solve the game.

“Arstad,” the wounded fisherman said after turning over a few cards. “That’s me name.”

“Dan.” They exchanged a firm, polite handshake. It was forced and awkward.

“I’ve seen that Gareth and Lerch are alright. How is, uh…?” Dan trailed off, not knowing the name of the youngest fisherman.

“Me son Westrel’s lookin’ ‘round for some tins o’ food,” Arstad said. He levelled a steady gaze at Dan. “There’s only four of us and you got plenty o’ meat on ya bones. I’ll not share. Got it?”

Dan nodded. He would’ve refused if offered. Now the scene was comparatively calmer to the blustering conflict in which they’d met, it was clear. The spirit’s meddling brought them against each other but it didn’t make them friends. Arstad’s crew was far from home and would need every scrap of supply to limp “Brazen Hussy” back to port and soothe her well again. Dan left just as Westrel came in with a sack full of dented ring-pull tins. He pressed himself to the cabin wall and gave Dan a wide berth, still fearful and wild-eyed. Dan patted him on the shoulder and almost buckled him. “You’re tough, kid.”

Two hours passed while the nameless cutter and “Brazen Hussy” bobbed idly in the easing buffets of the storm, bound together with rope and rigging like two men overboard hanging from the same driftwood for buoyancy, reassuring the other that they’d make it through. By the spirit’s continual effort of using portals to drain the cutter as it filled, they survived. Beautiful and distant morning sunbeams rose on the horizon, burned through the storm’s tail to chase it away.

***

“I’ll trade you,” Dan said. He was alone with the spirit in the cutter’s hold. The hatch was closed and the only light filtered by gridded shadows of porthole windows. “Come with us to Salvar. In return, you use your portals to keep the water out and us afloat while I mend the damage.”

The suck of draining water spinning down all green and foamy, lit from beneath by the blurred shape of a purple, otherworldly disc, was the only sound to break the pregnant silence that began their private exchange. Gareth warned him of bartering with fairies, and of lies and superstitions and half-truths and tricks. Dan folded his arms and put faith in the acuity of his tongue.

The spirit stared back at him. She smiled her amusement, expression careless and calm.

[Itera]

Itera was tired. She had been keeping the portals open for hours now and soon would be approaching her personal record. It was certain that she could go on maintaining these rifts for longer; the record stopped where it did because she had gotten bored and decided to do something else. That didn't make the whole business pleasant.

Itera recounted the results of her first foray into this bounty hunting business. She had declared the conditions and ended up landing no hits at all. Her clothes were soaked through and dripping and nobody's been mildly inconvenienced in vengeance. Yet. Her hat had gotten slashed and nobody's been seriously inconvenienced in vengeance. Yet. She had declared the wager and now someone was trying to alter the deal.

She needed tea and a cake to think clearly. There was an ache in her body from being tackled by two hundred pounds of smelly man. It was distracting, but not as distracting as the clammy, annoying feeling of being bound up with rope and chain. It was the chain that was the worst, the stink of iron always all around her.

All in all, not the best outcome, but that was what made games with humans so interesting. She smiled at Dan, slowly half-lidding one eye and outright closing the other one.

"You are a great fighter. I declared the conditions and you won, so of course I am yours." Compliments cost nothing. Lies cost nothing. The sucking of water filled the momentary silence.

"So long as you keep me bound here, I have no choice but to keep the hold dry. But ... I tire..." It would be too much to wobble the portal for effect here and Itera was already sagging against the ropes. Her always-lazy, drawling voice only helped matters. "I tire~ I thirst~ I hunger~ I cannot do what I cannot do. If my grasp slips, I shall have to go back. But you, how far can you travel on a ship with no mast?"

She paused here, opening one eye again so that she was looking at Dan with a lazy, about-to-sleep expression. It was so very useful to be able to spy on people, a tiny rift the size of a pinhole and your eyes and ears can roam anywhere. Itera added, "What about your brother? He seems ill~"

[Etheryn]

“He’s sick alright,” Dan replied. “But I’d suggest you leave him be. He didn’t ask for this.”

The ever blasé lull of the spirit’s question was laced with subtle threat and Dan felt the rise of a hot flush. He worried that his bluff was about to be called. The sagging figure of bundled skirt and wet frills may very well be able to steal the thoughts from Dan’s head, just the same as she could steal the space between each of her conjured wormholes.

“Is that so?” she said, offering the slightest upward curl of her painted lips.

“That is very so,” Dan said. He resorted to the only tact he knew and wrapped an iron chain over his fist like knuckledusters in a cheap barroom brawl. “In fact, it is so very so, that if it were any more so”—he leaned in close to show her the bulging capillaries in his wild eyes that told of the lengths he’d gone to, and would go to again—“you’ll find this buried in your face.”

Dan’s bluster was seen for what it was. Hot air exhaled from a tired lungs and a parched throat. The spirit sighed impatience. “Always with the threats,” she said, distant as if she was preoccupied by looking at something Dan couldn’t see.

Dan followed the spirit’s line of sight. It wasn’t the hull breach. In fact, it wasn’t anything of interest; just a spool of elastic cord tied to a bolted rung. A half-empty supply crate bobbed beneath it, not quite buoyant enough to be lifted from the hold floor. The damper and dried meat inside was saturated. He scanned over the rolled tarpaulins and wall-mounted tool boards that dangled pliers and saws from hooks, over the three legged stool that floated sideways and clattered into things while it dragged in the portal’s tide until consumed in the violet disc and vanished with the bilge.

“How long will it take?” she asked.

Dan lived as a wandering fixer and builder after leaving his life as a fisherman’s deckhand. If there was anyone fit for the job, it was him. He sized up the damage; fractured planks, not a clean and open break. “Half an hour.”

“I would suppose I can maintain my assistance for that time… If you say please.”

Dan was already emptying a tool board, intent to scavenge the plywood from which it was made. The claw of his hammer pried it from the nails which pinned it to the hold wall and he dumped the assortment of implements it stored into a pile atop a shelf. Dan might need them for the repair and had to avoid their loss. The wood snapped in half on his knee.

“Well?” the spirit asked.

Dan’s reply was muffled by nails pursed between his lips like they were chewed straw beneath the brim of a farmer’s hat. He was numb by the cruel cold of the water flowing against him as he knelt in front of the damage to stopper it up. “I ran out of cupcakes with cherries on top a long fucking time ago. Let me work.”

[Itera]

Humans!

Some of them were so protective of each other, it made the most fascinating sort of toy. All you have to do is gently prod one end and the other end would bounce like it was connected with a springy string. Some of them bounced rather predictably, too. Itera glanced down at the all-consuming vortex at the bottom of the boat and watched a package of biscuits spiral around and around in it. Then she looked up at the hammering noises as Dan started pounding the preliminary fasteners in.

Some seamen said that a ship leaking at dozens of small seams was more or less impossible to fix properly without a dry dock, on account of the immense pressure of the seawater outside resisting any attempt to push the planks back into an un-cracked position. It was like trying to bar a door while it was still ajar from the angry mob outside pushing in.

Itera didn't know any of this; she's never gone to sea because her home country had no sea. The little sailboats that some sailed on the lakes were treated like the toys that they were; if they started to sink, you jumped and flew out of it to go and steal somebody else's boat. What she was, though, was a quick study.

Dan's progress was slow for the first two planks on the edges and it stuttered to a halt entirely as he moved to the center of the crushed area. The cutter was too small and the hull's spline too severe. The straight planks of a tool board left too much of a gap against the curved planks below. Given time, he could have shaped the wood to fit by wetting it and heating it over a fire. Already, fatigue was pulling at every fiber of his being.

Itera noted the issue and, in her most languid voice, suggested, "If you let me off of this mast and lay closer, I can stop the water from coming in. You promised to take me to Salvar. You can even leave me tied~"

She only meant one of those sentences.

[Etheryn]

Dan retreated from the task, unable to effectively repair the hull damage against the insurmountable pressure of the water beating back. Blue crept into his fingertips and stole the simple dexterity needed to hold a plank in one hand and the hammer in the other. Both dropped into the water. Dan fumbled to retrieve his tool, and then clawed for the plywood when it was carried by the ebbing spiral of the emptying bilge. He missed it, splashing on hands and knees over the floating clutter of soggy ropes, tangled nets and sailor’s litter, and chased after it. Dan almost reached into his hand down into the purple disc before snatching it back; he didn’t want to find out what was on the other side.

He’d heard the spirit’s offer and delayed to reply. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make up his mind. He knew there was no room for any decision but acceptance. He knew something so alien and manipulative wouldn’t have bipartisan best interests in mind. There was danger ahead.

“There are things I know,” Dan said. He wasn’t looking at the spirit. He saw the shoddily nailed scraps of wood coming loose from their nails, and the result of his labours were sucked down and swallowed like the one he’d tried and failed to retrieve. “You need to go to Salvar. I need to go to Salvar. You can’t get there unless I take you, and I can’t get there unless you help me fix this.”

The spirit stared. Dan looped his hammer through its retainer on his belt, and while looking down to do so, noticed the diluted red stains matting his overalls. He touched his hand to his chin and took away blood. He’d not even felt the tear of his skin during the battle. Now, in its quiet, ominous aftermath, he had time to account for each of his injuries and pains and bruises.

“I also know that, uh, ‘things’ like you aren’t content with constraint. You’ll find a way out if I keep you tied up. You’ll find a reason to trick me and make this all backfire if I give you a reason.”

Still, the spirit was quiet. Vague. Ambiguously looking at either the tired, beaten down, shivering man before her, who’d only now realised the desperation of his predicament and that its only resolution was cooperation, or looking through her spyglass portholes at some other thing entirely. Dan slumped against the wall and rest his head and against his better judgement let the fatigue seep in. His limbs turned heavy and the shivering stopped. Thankfully, he now barely noticed the bone deep cold that’d sapped his ordinarily practical fingers. It was comfortable and at the same time it was alarm bells ringing. Hypothermia.

A breaching pillar of light accompanied the creak of the opening hatch, and sunshine split the dimness of the hold. Gareth’s voice filtered down. “Get out o’ there before ye drop dead in the chill, man! Let one o’ us come in and have a go at patchin’ the hole!”

“We’re untying her,” Dan said. He squinted up and visored his salt-stung eyes against the brightness to see the silhouette of Gareth’s hand reaching down to help him up. “We’ll take her with us and your crew can limp back to port. She can’t help otherwise.”

[Itera]

"Limp back to port? No way that's gonna work. We've been living off of old bacon and pease and bread for the last couple days. Trying to tack upwind against the prevailing? Without a mainmast? She'll gripe so hard we'll never be able to hold a course. No, we're committed till we get to port and can get a proper mast fixed."

"That'll be a right trick. Sea-chest isn't even stocked with money, it's still all back at port, those bounty hunters made us leave so quickly." Another voice asked from above.

"Well, that's why the we're keeping her until we get to Salvar, instead of tossing her over in a sackful of rocks. Bet she can sell for a penny in the right markets."

"Why, you know about those markets?"

"Arstad, you know I don't. It's just what they say, right? Just have to find the right people." Gareth turned back down towards the Dan, "Go and warm up in the cabin on our ship. We're wearing around to your lee; I bet we can back a sail and heel your ship over far enough to get that hole above water. It's going to be alright. Don't be talking crazy things like untying that thing. She gets loose again and we're all dead men." He eyed Itera standing calf-deep in the swirling waters in the hold, spat, and then slammed the hatch shut and battened it.

"No..." Dan's protests didn't quite make it to audible levels and his resistance didn't quite manage to prevent his being dragged over and swaddled in warmer clothing. The Brazen Hussy had its iron stove lit now and Westrel's hot soup was just the thing, although there were suspicious, hard-to-identify bits of things bobbing in it.

Over the course of the next hour or so, the cutter's flooding problem ceased as the fishing crew fasted lines to its masts and then heeled the whole ship a few dozen degrees. Everything loose and unsecured went sliding across decks until they hit bulkheads or the 'wales. This did not include Itera, who had fallen asleep in the darkness and ankle-deep in the remaining bilgewater.

Around the same time that Arstad and company were caulking the new wood patch on the cutter, Gareth entered Aaron and Dan's cabin. "Look, uh, do you know anyone in Salvar, Dan? Aaron? We're in a tight spot... shipyards charge real high to provide and step a new mainmast."