The old man who had come aboard with the two women wasted no time on the ceremony. He moved through the deck with the comfortable ease of someone who has been on this ship before and knows where he is going, heading directly for the cargo hold without waiting for an invitation or an escort.
I followed him, and noticed that Ivanna did too — falling into step beside him with the unhurried familiarity of someone accustomed to this particular visitor.
He stopped at the edge of the cargo hold and looked in. His eyes, for just a moment, did something that might generously be described as sparkling.
"You went to Selon!" He turned to Ivanna with a grin that reorganised his whole face. "That's why there's so much rice!"
"That's not all," she said, moving past him to one of the large trunks stacked against the far wall. She opened it without effort and stepped back to let him see.
Dried meats, honey-cured meats, salt-cured meats — packed in with the careful density of people who know how to make the most of available space.
The sound the old man made was somewhere between a gasp and a squeal, and I am reasonably certain that category of sound is not one he made often.
He was back down to the beach and back again within a quarter of an hour, this time with two other elderly men and a cart between them. The unloading began without ceremony — methodical, cheerful, the cart filling steadily with supplies that *The Lady* was giving away without charge and apparently without expectation of equivalent return. The island had very little to offer in exchange, and everyone present understood this without it needing to be said.
What they did offer, without putting it into words, was gratitude of the specific and genuine kind that comes from people who have learned not to expect much and are consistently surprised by anything beyond that.
I watched for a while, and then I decided to go down to the island.
Rei had not returned from the treeline. Phoenix and Sheriya had vanished into the forest some time ago, having shed their human appearances the moment they were far enough from the ship to do so without causing concern — or at least without causing concern to anyone who had not already adjusted to the nature of the company aboard *The Lady*. Benedict was sitting somewhere behind me with an apple and the expression of a man engaged in a private negotiation with his own thoughts, and Ivanna was occupied with the supply transfer.
The ship's crew was, by any reasonable measure, too small for a vessel of this size. The four remaining guild members who had fallen ill during the Arpa heat had been left behind at the Silver Coin Inn with Olga when the ship departed, with the understanding that they would make their own way west once they recovered. Olga herself would remain in Arpa — she had been there for the better part of a decade, apparently, and the city had become something she stayed in rather than passed through.
I stepped off the gangway and onto the beach.
The sand from the deck had looked almost like snow — so white it registered as cold before you touched it. The reality was the opposite: warm under my bare feet, the particular dry warmth of sand that has been in the sun all day, giving back what it has absorbed. The sensation moved up through the soles of my feet and I stood still for a moment and simply felt it.
I loved the ocean. I had not realised, until this moment, quite how much I had also missed land.
I walked along the waterline for a while, letting the shallow waves reach my feet and retreat, letting the sun do what it had been doing all morning and would continue to do regardless of what I chose to do with myself. Then I looked toward the treeline.
A trail was visible through the undergrowth — narrow at the entrance, almost deliberately concealed by the shrubs at its beginning, but widening into something well-maintained beyond that first impression. Three people could walk it side by side comfortably. It had been cared for regularly, by people who knew where it led and wanted to reach it without difficulty.
I turned toward it and followed it in.
The forest had a different quality than the open beach — cooler, the light filtering down through the canopy in moving patterns as the breeze shifted the leaves above. Small creatures moved in the undergrowth on either side, and at the sound of my footsteps — or perhaps at something they sensed rather than heard — they retreated into the deeper brush with a unanimity that was becoming familiar. Since the transformation, animals had developed a consistent policy of removing themselves from my vicinity. They saw through whatever I wore on the surface to what was actually there, and made their assessment accordingly.
It didn't particularly bother me. It did, however, make me think.
How long had it been since I had left Draga? A year, more or less. It felt considerably longer — not in a painful way, but in the way of a life that has changed enough in a given period that the before and after feel less like adjacent chapters and more like separate books. The Rhia who had left the north was gone in a way that was not merely metaphorical. She had ceased to exist in a specific, physical sense, and what had come after was still, in certain unguarded moments, a surprise to me.
I raised the arm that wore *The Bliss* and let the light through the canopy catch the stone.
It shimmered quietly, the way it always did.
There was something on the other side of this bracelet. Some reason I was not entirely at peace with the way things were, some weight that lived in a part of me I could not currently reach. When I tried to approach it — tried to remember what had gone wrong, what had brought me here, what had broken — I found nothing but the particular blankness of something that is not absent but blocked.
I could remove it. The answer was right there, one clasp away.
I wasn't ready.
I lowered my arm and kept walking.
---
The trail ended at a clearing.
It was a quiet place — a dozen small clay houses with dried-brush roofs arranged in a rough circle, the kind of settlement that had grown organically rather than been planned, each structure positioned where it made sense rather than where a grid demanded. A small fire burned at the clearing's centre. Beside it, sitting on a tree stump with the resigned posture of someone in the middle of a long and necessary task, was Rei.
The two old women were nearby, and several more elderly residents of the island had gathered at a respectful distance. In front of Rei, arranged on the ground in a loose collection, were everyday objects — clay pots, wooden implements, tools of various kinds — all of them bearing the carved lines and circular patterns of engraving magic. All of them, from the faint magical signature they emitted, nearly depleted.
Rei himself had both hands held over the clay pot directly in front of him, and the rose-tinted presence of his magic was moving steadily from him into the carved channels of the object, filling them the way water fills a vessel — slow, deliberate, methodical. Replenishing what had been used.
He finished the pot. He exhaled — tired, satisfied, the particular combination of someone who has done something difficult and done it well. Then his eyes moved to the remaining items on the ground.
He made a quiet sound of resigned acceptance.
"Need a hand?" I asked, walking into the clearing.
He looked up. And something in his face, in the moment before he arranged it into the expression he had intended to show, was simply glad.
"That would be very much appreciated," he said.
I sat down across from him and looked at the array of objects between us, and began to work out how to offer what I had in abundance to something that had been built by someone else's hands, through a method I understood only in the most general terms.
It would take some figuring out. But we had time, and the clearing was quiet, and the afternoon light was coming through the trees at exactly the right angle.