The days on the island settled into a peaceful rhythm, each person finding their own way of occupying the time. There was no particular schedule and no pressing demands, and the absence of both produced a quality of ease I had not felt in a long while.
My mornings began the same way each day: up the narrow trail, cup of Heilan tea in hand, the peak and its field of flowers waiting in the early light. A few minutes of genuine solitude, the kind that exists before the world has fully woken up and started asking things of you.
Then the footsteps on the trail.
I had stopped being surprised by them. Wherever I went, he would eventually appear — not intrusively, not with the quality of someone who had decided to impose himself, but with the quiet inevitability of someone who has simply determined that being near me is where they prefer to be and is not going to pretend otherwise. I had made my peace with it, more or less. The mornings we spent up there together were spent in easy silence, the two of us occupying the boulder and the view and the occasional bird call and the sound of the wind through the flowers, and it was, if I was honest about it, the most comfortable kind of company.
I was in the middle of thinking something along the lines of 'I could stay here indefinitely' when other footsteps arrived — these ones different, quick and urgent in their rhythm, carrying the specific quality of someone moving faster than they would like to be moving because the news they're carrying doesn't allow for a leisurely pace.
I turned to Rei. He had heard it too.
We both watched the path.
Benedict appeared, slightly out of breath, his expression carrying the compressed energy of someone who has seen something and comes immediately to report it.
"Three ships on the eastern horizon," he said. Just that.
Rei exhaled slowly, with the quality of someone confirming a thing they had been hoping wouldn't happen.
"So it's them," he said.
"Is there any chance at all they're going their own way?" His voice held the particular hopefulness of a man who already knew the answer.
"You know there isn't." Benedict gave him a look. "And they've almost certainly already spotted 'The Lady'. You think they come across a merchant vessel that size and just carry on about their day?"
"Who exactly are we talking about?" I asked, when the conversation showed no sign of pausing to include me.
They both turned to look at me with the synchronised expression of people who have just remembered they have an audience.
"Pirates," they said, in unison.
---
We went back to the ship to get a proper look at them. Through the telescope mounted at the stern, pointed east, the three ships were clearly visible even in the morning light — dark hulls, dark sails, moving with the directed purpose of vessels that have seen something and changed course toward it. Three of them, in a loose formation that suggested coordination.
The crew gathered around the telescope one by one and took their turn looking. Ivanna, who had been in the middle of what sounded like a genuinely engaging lesson on herb preparation with one of the island elders, was distinctly unamused about the timing.
"I said this the last time we encountered them," she announced, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for the opportunity to revisit a previous argument. "Instead of paying whatever they called that protection arrangement, we should have simply reduced them to pieces. All of them."
"Agreed," Phoenix said, with an enthusiasm that was slightly too bright to be entirely about strategy. He cracked his knuckles and looked eastward with what could only be described as anticipation.
"The immediate priority is leaving the island," Rei said, with the calm of someone who has already worked through the problem and arrived at the first step. "If we stay, they'll come here. These elders don't need pirates deciding their island is worth investigating. Everyone gather what you have on shore, say your farewells, and be back here within the hour. We depart after that."
The teenagers produced sounds of genuine dejection. Sheriya, notably, had no visible objection — she simply nodded and began moving.
Benedict was already heading into the ship's interior before the announcement was fully finished.
"I'll prepare 'The Lady'," he said, without elaboration, and disappeared.
I looked after him briefly, wondering what prepare meant in this context, and then decided to follow the others to the island rather than investigate.
---
My belongings on shore were modest. What took slightly longer was receiving the gifts the islanders had assembled for me — pressed upon me with the particular warmth of people who want to express gratitude and have chosen the most meaningful available vessels for it.
Most of them gave me Heilan flower tea, having noticed over the past four days exactly how many cups I had consumed and drawn the correct conclusions about my feelings on the matter. Others had prepared small accessories made from the island's own materials — clay shaped and painted with a dye derived from the Heilan flower itself, giving the finished pieces a pale pink base with a faint gold iridescence that shifted when the light caught them differently. Some were bracelets, some pendants. Several were long decorative pins with seashell ends, designed to be worked into hair.
I tried one in my hair immediately, which was somewhat more difficult than anticipated now that my hair was considerably shorter than I was accustomed to working with, but eventually manageable.
I packed everything carefully and went to say goodbye.
Some of the elders were reluctant even after we explained the reason for leaving early, which was touching in a way that also made the leaving harder. We had been there four days of a planned seven, and the loss of the remaining three was felt on both sides of the farewell. I stood with each of them long enough to mean it.
Then we set sail.
---
Approximately half an hour into the open water, I climbed to where Rei was positioned at the stern with the telescope. He had been checking the eastern horizon at intervals, and I could read the result in his posture before he said anything.
"They're following us," he said. The relief and the trouble were present in equal measure in his voice — relief that the island's elderly inhabitants would be left alone, trouble because the alternative was a direct encounter on open water with no particular advantage in our favour.
"Are they genuinely dangerous?" I asked. I was not asking out of fear. I was asking because the answer seemed relevant to what I was already beginning to consider.
He lowered the telescope.
"They are. We've paid them a fee on every voyage — not protection exactly, more of an arrangement that translates to: 'we will leave your ship intact and your crew alive in exchange for this.' It's extortion with better manners." He paused, his gaze settling on the water somewhere between us and the ships we couldn't see with the naked eye from here. "I've seen what they do to ships that refuse. I happened across the aftermath once. Three merchant vessels, reduced to rubble on the surface of the water. The sea around the wreckage had turned red. Limbs. Debris. Schools of fish arriving for what the water had become." He said it flatly, which made it more rather than less disturbing. "It was not something I forgot."
"With your capabilities," I said, looking at him directly, "and Ivanna's, and the others — why have you not dealt with them?"
He smiled, and it was the sad, slightly tired version.
"The numbers alone would be manageable, perhaps. Three hundred men across three ships — that is a great many, but not impossible with the right application of power." He paused. "The problem is the fleet captain's daughter."
"What about her?"
"She's a Nullifier." He looked at me as if waiting to see whether the word meant anything to me.
It did not.
"What is a Nullifier?" I asked.