* * *
“If you can fly,” asked Samuel, sharpening a slim driftwood stake, “why did you bother with a ship in the first place?”
“Even birds need to land.” Erik leaned back on his elbows and looked out to sea. The day was cloudless and the horizon a misty band of pale blue above the darker waves. He couldn’t see a trace of land anywhere. “We’re not albatrosses, not even close. It takes strength to get us aloft and keep us there. More than most birds, I’d reckon, though I doubt any man’s made a study of it.”
“Ah.” The other man’s brown eyes lit with curiosity. Here, Erik thought, was one who might have been a scholar had his birth allowed as much. “What’s the furthest you can fly?”
“That’d depend on the winds,” Erik said.
After the first bustle of activity, the remaining camp had settled into near idleness in Toinette’s absence. Marcus and Franz fished, though Erik suspected that they might be drowsing in the process. He and Samuel were keeping watch, whittling spears for fishing and cooking, and talking. The men spoke to him more easily now. For all the revelation of his nature, the wreck had stripped away a few of the boundaries rank and payment implied.
Turning the stake in his own hand and scraping the wood with the knife, he thought it over. “I spent a whole day aloft once. I was young, and one of my cousins had dared me to do it. Could barely move for the next week.” He chuckled with the memory. “My uncle gave me no sympathy at all. The chambermaids, on the other hand…”
He and Samuel laughed together. “I tried to ride my father’s best stallion once,” said the other man, teeth flashing white in his dark face, “by way of impressing the goldsmith’s daughter. I was lucky to get away with only bruises. Dad said, if Leviathan had left me able to sit down that night,hewouldn’t have—which was more than a bit embarrassing at sixteen.”
“Your father owned many horses?”
“Sold them. My older brother does now—or last I was in port long enough to see him. I was trained in that too, but—” He shrugged.
“Never liked the beasts overmuch?” Erik asked.
Samuel nodded. “Too temperamental. Too messy. Fine mounts for noblemen, of course,” he added hastily.
Erik laughed. “You needn’t fear to give offense. We’re not much for riding when we can avoid it. Few horses can abide us calmly.”
“Ah,” Samuel said, and scraped away a bit more at the stake. “Stands to reason, that does. They’re damned panicky beasts at the best of times. Now, going to trade them was likely what gave me the taste for the road—it just took a different form. I remember my first sight of the ocean. Went on forever, it did, and could take me anywhere.”
“Not quite mild-mannered itself,” Erik pointed out, gesturing around them.
“No. But it smells better.”
“Were you always with Toinette?”
“Nay, I ran away—more than fifteen years gone now.” Samuel scratched his head with the slow gesture and the startled look of a man finding that time tallied up faster than he’d expected. It was an expression long familiar to Erik, on mortal and dragon-blooded face alike. None of them could ever keep up. “I’ve been five with the Captain. I’ll say, I knew she was an odd sort of a woman, but I never thought anything like—” He waved his hands, heedless of knife and spear alike, in an inarticulate gesture.
“Hard to think of it,” said Erik, “until you know it’s possible. That’s probably true of a good many things.”
“Mmm. Do you know each other? Even when you don’t know each other, that is?”
“Not mostly, I’d think,” said Erik. “There are signs: often we’ve odd-colored eyes even as men, and fire won’t burn us, and we live a long time. But you’d have to wait around a long while for the last, plenty of mortals have strange eyes, and you can’t go around shoving people’s hands into the hearth on suspicion. And then, we’re not the only uncanny creatures in the world.”
Samuel cast his eyes down to the rosary looped through his belt. “Arethere demons?” he asked.
“Oh, aye,” said Erik. “I’ve never seen one, but a few of my cousins have fought them. Nasty things, from the stories they told me. Not so likely to trouble most folk, though, save those that anger a wizard of great power and no morals. Generally they’ve got to be called up.”
That news looked to calm Samuel a trifle. Erik wished he could have been more certain; he’d only a few stories to go on. It was true that most men went their whole lives without seeing more demons than came out of a wineskin, but that was in the known world, with the Church and magic like Artair’s to hold the fabric of it together.
Erik suddenly became aware of how much water surrounded the island, and how few people were alive on it. For Samuel’s sake, he repressed the urge to shudder, or to cross himself.
Twelve
“We didn’t find the spring yet,” said Toinette, seating herself on a rock. “But there’s a stream up there that’ll do nicely. Means we can bathe too, so long as we do it downstream of where we get water.”
“Couldn’t you bathe in the ocean?” Erik stacked another piece of driftwood onto the fire.
Samuel, assisting him, shook his head. “Salt itches. Surprised you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve been trying not to feel too keenly.” Erik didn’t look at Toinette when he said it. He hadn’t meant lust when he spoke, but it was all of a piece, in a way: the damp sand for a bed, the dried salt on his skin, the restless urges that they hadn’t the solitude to satisfy. Best, he thought, to avoid dwelling on any of it.
