55. [Uicha] Solstice, Part Three (Patreon)

Uicha de Orak, Wildcard, representing The Forgotten One

Those he has met so far…

…and those he will meet soon

***

30 Frett, 61 AW

Aboard the Dartmyth, Central Sea

150 days until the next Granting

Uicha stood at the front of the boat with his elbows braced against the wooden rail, letting the salt wind whip across his face. It stung, but in a good way. Nothing but open sea in front of him, the ship slashing through peaceful waters, panels of sunlight shimmering where the clouds parted.

The bow, he reminded himself. The front of the ship was called the bow. Akoni de Emasyn had taught him that.

He had met Akoni on his third day in Noyega. Well, his third day of freedom. He’d spent weeks there tied up, hanging from a ceiling. He didn’t count those.

Uicha should’ve left sooner, fled back north straight away like Kayenna Vezz suggested and spared himself all the trouble. But he’d been so close to the water, so close to escape from the continent, that Uicha couldn’t bring himself to leave even with Ahmed Roh’s corpse cooling nearby.

The problem, Uicha learned, was that despite all he’d been through, he still had a boy’s face and a boy’s wide eyes.

The people of Noyega wanted to pluck him like a ripe grape.

That first night, after Roh, Uicha had found an inn for sailors. A dump where he wouldn’t stand out. He ate gritty seafood stew until he almost made himself sick, then slept most of the next day, and only woke up when the inn’s cook made too much noise rifling through Uicha’s pack.

He switched inns. Bought some clothes. Visited a doctor who specialized in plucking broken glass out of skulls, not because he thought this random sawbones would have any chance of removing his crimson tattoo or extracting the Orvesian ghost from his mind, but because he wanted to buy some bandages. Uicha wrapped up his neck and chest and some of his shoulders. Made it look like he’d been burned. At least, now he didn’t have to wear Roh’s scarf all the time.

The Forgotten One had demanded that Uicha be seen. To hell with that. Uicha attracted enough attention without flaunting his unnatural Ink.

Case in point, some guys tried to mug him outside the doctor’s. One of them stabbed him in the stomach with a knuckle-knife. Uicha wondered if the mugger had a lot of experience dealing nonfatal cuts, or if the gods no longer protected him because of his [Regeneration+]. He forgot to wipe the blood off his face—not all his—before he got back to the inn. That raised too many eyebrows, so he left. Decided to spend the night on the street. There were plenty of alleys and culverts in Noyega. And besides, he had Parrot II to watch over him.

That’s what Uicha had named the gargoyle. He couldn’t explain how he knew, but the gargoyle was the same every time he summoned it. Where did Parrot II go when Uicha wasn’t using him? Did it live in his Ink? Did it keep Kayenna company in Uicha’s increasingly crowded subconscious?

He ventured a little further into Noyega—the streets got cleaner around the casinos, almost like they expelled all the misery out beyond a certain radius—but he kept getting drawn back toward the waterfront. The city was too big for him. Even just the sprawling network of docks were bigger than Ambergran in its entirety.   

 Uicha decided he would hire a boat. A complicated task because he looked like a poor islander, a haunted one, a clueless kid on the run. He needed to find a captain that seemed discrete and honorable. Showing he had money had only caused him trouble so far.

But it was all trouble that Uicha could handle. Maybe that was another reason he lingered in Noyega. Everyone kept trying him, and they all kept regretting it. There was a thrill in that. Roh’s hired goons, the thieving cook, the muggers—he had fought them all off. He had fought them off easily.

The crimson Ink felt hot on his chest. Let this whole city come down on him.  

Uicha shoved that feeling down. He figured he had pushed his luck enough when he spotted one of the men who had been guarding Roh’s boat. The man’s arm was in a sling—he wasn’t sure if Parrot II had done that when he knocked him into the water, or if it had happened later, perhaps at the hands of the half dozen hard-looking men and women who flanked him now. This group looked more polished than the dock trash Uicha had been encountering. They all wore light ward-weave armor except for the leader, a dark-haired woman in a vest of patterned silk. The woman’s attire left little to the imagination, and so even at a distance Uicha could spot the Ink of one of Noyega’s champions.

They were heading in the direction of the red light boats. As Uicha watched, the woman stopped walking, the others bumping into each other as she did. She cocked her head and turned in Uicha’s direction.

Luckily, the waterfront was crowded—sailors disembarking with heavy pockets or slinking back to their ships with glum looks—and Uicha quickly turned in the other direction. He made himself small and shuffled away, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder.

A man walked next to him, matching his pace. At first, Uicha saw only his sandaled feet. When Uicha hazarded a glance up, he discovered an islander striding along beside him, smiling at him bemusedly.

“You only need say the words, little brother,” the man urged.

Uicha had seen other islanders in his three days in Noyega, but had avoided approaching them. Although they looked like him, they didn’t talk like him. They were always in groups—drinking and laughing and rolling dice—and Uicha felt intimidated by their foreignness. He had winced at this notion; truly he was a child of Ambergran.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Uicha said.

“I don’t know what you mean?” The man repeated Uicha’s words, dropping his musical accent and instead drawing out all the vowels. “Where you been living, little brother? To make you talk like that?”

Uicha tried to quicken his pace, but the man kept up easily. He was taller than Uicha, in his mid-twenties, with a zigzagging beard and a mop of hair shaped like a duck’s bill. Clearly, a sailor of some kind, but then that was all the islanders. All except for Uicha.

“I seen you with that fast walk and them wild eyes,” the islander continued when Uicha didn’t respond. “Looking like you’d stirred up a ghost. All bandaged up with a sword on your hip. You in some danger, I think.”

“I’m from the north,” Uicha said. “My parents were islanders, but I…”

“But you’ve never been,” the man finished, suppressing laughter at Uicha’s country accent. “And you want to go home, now? To your real home?”

Uicha nodded.

“Your parents never taught you the words?”

“What words?” Uicha asked.

The islander put a heavy but gentle hand on Uicha’s shoulder and steered them into the gap between a fishmonger’s stand and a bait shop. Uicha tried not to wrinkle his nose at the odor. These were dockside smells that his islander nose should’ve been prepared for.

“When our people find themselves in jeopardy, they can say the words and any islander who can hear must honor them,” the man said. “Help is rendered, no questions asked, but a debt is owed.”

“What kind of debt?”

The man shrugged. “A fair trade for the risk, that is all. We are not a people of contracts or receipts. You make good on the debt however you can, so your ancestors aren’t shamed.”

Uicha hesitated. “I need to get out of this city. But I can pay. I’m not looking for charity.”

“Aha. I have a boat, but we do not ferry passengers,” the islander said. He poked his head out of the alley, glancing around. “You might yet find an honorable captain for hire. A captain who will not take one look at you and see an easy mark with a rarely used sword. One who will not rob you on the ocean and dump you overboard for the gods to float back to shore. But, even should you find this honorable captain, they might still ask questions. They might talk of a bandaged islander boy with a strange accent and a pack stamped with the emblem of the Magelab. Your problems compound, little brother.”

Uicha fought the urge to swing his pack off his shoulders to look for the symbol. He should have noticed that.

“Are you an honorable captain, then?” Uicha asked.

“Far from it. I chase curiosities and opportunities. I reach for them until someone slaps my hand away.” The man grinned. “Yet, I always honor the custom of our people. I listen for the call. Na flamanga ‘e na emad.”

“Any port in a storm,” Uicha said, translating the words.

“Ah, so you do know them.”

He did, but Uicha could not say how. The meaning of the words surfaced, yet he could not remember learning them. The memory was gone.

“I am Akoni de Emasyn, captain of the Dartmyth,” the islander said. “Do you have an islander name? Or are you a Charles or something stupider?”

“You said no questions asked.”

Akoni smirked. “You did not yet say the words, little brother.”

“Na flamanga ‘e na emad.”

“I hear your call, islander!” Akoni popped his head out of the alley again. “Come. We can leave right away.”

Just like that, Uicha became a passenger aboard the Dartmyth. He had never seen a Flamingo vessel before and had been surprised by how large and elegant the ship was. The boat was shaped like a crescent moon with a deep underdeck to hold the spacious crew quarters and all the treasures Akoni planned to amass. It was made from a glossy, chocolate-colored wood, said to grow only in the Flamingo Islands. The Dartmyth had two sails—a mainsail and a jib, Uicha had learned—that did not seem large enough to propel the craft. Including Akoni, the boat only had a crew of six. Uicha expected hard work and calloused hands. Instead, he found a crew who spent most of their days sunbathing and playing cards.

The Dartmyth was part of what the islanders called the blessed fleet—ships that had a decade’s worth of wishes spent on them. The sails were always full, no matter the weather. The ship cut through the water with impossible speed, and tacked with a sharpness that would have snapped any other boat’s rudder. Akoni and his crew were diligent about maintenance and cleaning, but mostly the Dartmyth sailed on its own.

Uicha rested his hands on the wood of the bow, imagining that he could feel the power of the gods flowing beneath his fingers. A boat that took direction and hoisted its own sails. A far cry from the life of chores and storms that had driven his parents onto land.

“Stop this pensive staring, Uicha!” Akoni shouted. “You have knots to tie!”

 Uicha turned to find the captain standing behind him with a loop of rope slung over his shoulder and mug of coffee in his hand. Once they were safely disembarked from Noyega, Uicha had told Akoni and the others his name. They did not know his grandfather—Bric de Orak—but said he would be easy to track down from the Admiralty office in Flamboyance, the largest island in the archipelago.

Akoni tossed Uicha the rope. He had taken it upon himself to teach Uicha how to work a ship, even if the Dartmyth required few of these skills to run. There were only so many ships in the blessed fleet, Akoni told him, and so he if Uicha hoped to make a living in the islands, he would need to learn to work a traditional ship.

Uicha doubted he would be making any kind of life in the islands, but it was nice to pretend. So he tied his knots daily.

“Always daydreaming,” Akoni said as Uicha untangled the rope. “Our people are doers, not dreamers. You should remember that.”

“I was thinking about my parents,” Uicha said. “I wonder what they would’ve thought of a ship like yours.”

“They probably wouldn’t have pissed off to the country if they had a ship like mine,” Akoni said with a laugh. “Is that what weighs you down, little brother? You miss your home in the grass?”

Uicha turned his gaze north as he made a loop with the rope.

“No,” he replied. “Not at all.”

***

So far, Trick Longblossom was the only one to come out above the first renown, and the gods had only seen him as a second. The barest sliver of power compared to someone like Sara Free, the paladin he'd met in Briarbridge and briefly traveled with during a fruitless search for Uicha de Orak.

But gods, what a sliver.

He'd always been a natural with a bow, so it shocked Trick just how much better he could get. His eyesight had gotten sharper, his fingers more nimble. 

Trick had been fully prepared to take a sucker's bet. Signing up to be a champion of a half-dead town. The last bad call in a lifetime full of them. When the Ink spread across his chest and the little wormy guy let him pick his abilities, Trick's outlook changed. Power felt like possibility. Perhaps he, Tabitha, and the other dimwits could actually restore this place. Or, at least, do it some justice.

There were two others so far. Eli Loghollow, who Trick remembered as a mean town drunk, a good-for-nothing that always wanted to be a champion, but who the Quill always had the good sense to turn down. Now, without many options, Eli would at last get to prove he was better than everyone who'd ever looked down on him. He'd chosen fighter as a class which seemed basic, even to Trick, who himself was but a humble archer. 

And then there was Anna Wildfield who had lost her parents, her husband, and three children during the annihilation. She was the last of her line, like Trick was of his. Her grief was a constant, vibrating thing, and Trick avoided her as much as possible given that they were now colleagues of a sort. She made Trick feel sorry that he wasn’t feeling enough. Anna had selected the class of Death Mage, which the records said had never been held by one of Ambergran's champions and was, in fact, not often seen outside of Orvesis. Trick had no doubt the woman planned to die on the island, and attempt to take some Orvesians with her. Fair enough. He wouldn’t try to talk her out of it.

They would need to find a fourth volunteer. Someone who wanted to live, Trick hoped, but beggars couldn't be choosers. If no one else stepped up, Tabitha Gentlerain said she would do it, become one of those Quills that also fought. Trick didn't think the squat little woman had it in her. He had heard she took off into the woods for weeks after the annihilation, practically lost her mind, although she seemed well enough now. 

“The Ink feels thinner,” Tabitha said. She cupped her golden inkwell in one hand, stirring with her quill.

“How's that, now?” Trick asked. 

The two of them stood in Tabitha's barn. Her farmhouse was gone, so she'd been sleeping in here. Trick didn't know whether the animals had disintegrated or if Tabitha simply let them go. 

“Just a feeling I have,” Tabitha said. She raised and lowered the inkwell as if testing the weight. “Something the gods put in my head. I sense the Ink is drying up. They might take it back.”

Trick nodded. Like how he could read the language of the gods now—the slashes and whorls splashed across his chest—he had no doubt of Tabitha's special knowledge. Every day, there were fewer true citizens of Ambergran. Some left to find somewhere less clouded in death, some took the blackbird, and a couple had even adopted the shield symbol of the Ministry. At least the mission were apologetic when that happened. Unlike the Orvesians, they hadn’t come here to convert.  

What Tabitha felt was the town diminishing. Trick could see that well enough with his own eyes.

“All the more reason to do this,” Trick said. “Show the gods and everyone else that we still exist.”

“If it even works,” Tabitha murmured. 

Trick patted the woman’s back. “If it doesn’t, we’re no worse off than we are now. And no one knows except the two of us.”

Tabitha nodded and crouched down. They had cleared straw and dirt from a space on the floor, and now Tabitha dribbled her dwindling Ink onto the boards. She had told Trick when she marked him that she wasn’t much of an artist. The gods guided her hand as she sketched out the symbol of the blackbird.

“I have made an open road from my lands…”