“Shouldn’t we be leaving?” Marco peered into the dark around the jail. “You made it seem like those guards wouldn’t be gone forever.”

“Something to show you first.” Tatric walked further into the dark. “Something you haven’t seen.”

He and the captain led Marco to a small space beyond the jail, crammed between it and the next government building. There, in a small square courtyard, was an even smaller graveyard of sorts.

“Read me a gravestone,” the old Deckmaster said.

“Tatric, we don’t have…”

“Read me one. Go ahead.”

Marco moved to the first, but time had apparently not been kind to the text that had once probably graced its face. He moved to the next simple marker, finding it was blank as well. The next four or five cemented the pattern the first two had set. All of them were blank.

“What’s this?” Marco asked. “I don’t understand.”

“You weren’t ever meant to. It’s something we don’t talk about much. This island is a good place, Marco. And generally speaking, the government does good work here. But every once in a while, you see a person get taken into custody swearing they’ll break out, or do something once their sentence is over who just doesn’t. Doesn’t break out, doesn’t ever come back, and is never seen again.”

“Disappeared, is how ship-folk say it. Not just in prison. You hear from people in prison. Gone. Never to be seen again,” Garrick added.

“Every place the government touches has graveyards like these. No names on the markers. Just a stone above a dead man nobody wanted to put a name to.”

“You are saying…”

“I’m saying that not everything a government does is done in the daylight. It’s a necessary evil, though I can’t say that I particularly agree with it.”

“Not many do,” Garrick said. “We just needed you to know that there might be more threat in all this than just being sent out to pasture before your years call for it. Now, let’s go.”

They were walking for a few minutes before Garrick broke the silence again.

“We’re getting you off the island. When the clerics find out what happened, they’ll report it back to the nearest government outpost. It’ll be at most a day until they arrive. And then they’ll take control of your life and never let it go.”

Marco nodded solemnly. “I could go with you. You’ve got your own ship, right? You told me that out on the sea, the ship’s your own country. No rules, no laws.”

“That’s… more true than you know, boy. On the sea, when a captain has his boots on the deck of his own ship, he’s the king of his own country.” Garrick chewed on a piece of fat from the side of the roast thoughtfully. The hope of something different from his current destiny welled up fast in Marco’s heart before Garrick lowered his boot and stomped it out. “Can’t do it, though. Ship’s in for overhaul. It’s a full class change for the old girl. She’ll be down for a month.”

“You can’t just do that somewhere else? Pause it, start again on another island?” Marco was over to Garrick’s side before he knew it. He felt his eyes start to water and, for once, didn’t wipe them. “Please?”

“I’m sorry, Marco. Can’t help. It’s already started. Once the system gets in on an upgrade, it won’t stop for anything. Not even saving a life. My ship won’t move until she’s done, and they’ll be here long before that,” Garrick said.

Marco let his shoulders slump just a bit. “So that’s it? Not only am I not going to be a captain, I’m going to be in that grave?”

“Not exactly. What do you think it means to be a captain?”

“Someone with a captain class? And a ship?” Marco offered. “But I’m not a captain. Just a Marauder. You heard the priest say it.”

“That’s the thing of it, though. As a matter of law, captain doesn’t just mean a class with the word captain in it. There are too many classes that are captains in function that don’t take the word itself into the name. Admiral. Rowmaster. Ferry Commander.”

“Fairies have a navy?”

“Ferry like the… Quiet, boy. I’m on a roll. Tatric, if he has a seaworthy craft and his feet on the deck, he’s a captain.”

Marco tried to figure out why the captain was explaining all of this, but he couldn’t see any way it applied. Tatric could. The old man took in a sharp breath and brought a sharp glare down on Garrick like he was trying to cut him in half with a look.

“That thing?” Tatric exclaimed. “You mean that insanity? Absolutely not. I’m supposed to be acting as the boy’s father, not his executioner. I thought you had another ship.”

“I do have another ship. That one. It’s seaworthy.”

“After twenty years of termites and rot? Not a chance.”

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“Termites? We left it surrounded by rock, you old fart. What kind of termite can make its way through stone?”

“You’re serious?” Tatric seemed to read something deeper in Garrick’s face, digging with his perceptive eye against the captain’s smirk.

Marco watched the back and forth up to that point, then couldn’t contain himself anymore.

“What are we talking about? Garrick, you have a ship?”

“He has… oh, damn it all. It’s not an easy thing to explain. Come along. I’ll show you. It couldn’t be much more than a half hour walk,” Tatric said.

The three of them set off down the beach. Gulf Isle was actually a good-sized island. Even at the fastest Marco could go, it would have taken hours to get around the whole thing. A half hour was enough to get him to a part of coastline he had seen but wasn’t really all that familiar with, especially when their destination was a particularly craggy part that wasn’t fun to navigate through or over.

The adults had kept quiet most of the way over, and Marco had known better than to get them arguing. There was something about how the old man was acting that seemed to hint to him that he was on a knife’s edge between agreeing to whatever Garrick was suggesting and shutting it down forever. When the old man dug his feet in, there was no shifting them.

I just have to keep him from digging in. I can be quiet.

Marco barely kept his mouth shut. Another five minutes of picking down the rocky coast as Garrick kept his eyes glued to the rock wall above the narrow beach brought them to a pile of rubble, the remnants of some landslide piled up against an otherwise solid barrier.

“Stand back. Your new class probably beefed you up a bit, but this is going to be messy,” the captain said.

Tatric pulled Marco back as Garrick pulled a saber from his belt, took a deep breath, and swept it at the pile of rock. Marco realized he had never seen the captain use his real force as the pile of rock exploded away from the wall, showering the beach with gravel for a good twenty yards as Garrick checked the blade, sighed, and resheathed it.

“Nicked it, dammit.”

“Of course you did,” Tatric scoffed. “It was never meant for rock. We can grind it out in the morning. Now show the boy your secret before he has a heart attack.”

“Ah, yes.” Garrick reached for his storage pouch and removed a light stone, breathing on it to activate it. He tossed it into the cave his excavation had revealed, where there was a tunnel big enough to ride a horse through, if not quite comfortably. Marco forgot to breathe as he saw what was inside. “There she is. The Foolish Endeavor.”

It was a ship. It was complete in every sense. It had a sail, even if that sail was buried under salt and dust. It had a mast, a deck, what looked like an area below deck for storage, and rails. It had a wheel. It even had what looked like a working cannon.

It was just much, much too small to be what it looked like. The craft was bigger than a rowboat both in width and length, but not much. It was deeper than a fishing boat, and it didn’t have any obvious oars or places to mount them, but it was still far less than a ship in every sense of the word.

“We made it to run illegal goods,” Garrick explained. “Illegal ones at the time. Now you could buy what we were transporting at any good apothecary’s shop. It’s a ship in every way the system cares about. Every bit of the design is what a larger ship would have. That meant I could use it as a captain and get every enhancement I should that wasn’t based on size, which is most of them.”

“One day this idiot shows up at my dock in the damn thing. ‘Tatric! You have to help me hide this!’ he shouts, like he doesn’t look like some kind of nautical giant wearing a ship like a pair of shoes,” Tatric grumbled.

“And you did?” Marco asked.

“He bribed me with whiskey.”

“And that worked?”

“It was damn good whiskey,” Garrick answered. “They should have caught me anyway, except they couldn’t imagine I had built such a small ship. We carried it here, put it in the cave, and nobody ever thought to check places that small. Got away with it clean.”

“You got away with it clean.” Tatric glared at the Captain again, although he was clearly in a better mood now. “They watched me like hawks for years after that. They thought I could magically disappear a ship.”

Marco walked over to the ship and laid his hands on it. He had some of a crafter’s know-how, now, and it wasn’t in as bad of shape as it looked. It wasn’t in good shape, of course, at least not by any reasonable definition of the word. But the bones of the thing were still there. It was better than sawdust, if only by a little.

“It’s beautiful.” Marco was sincere. The little ship looked like hope. “Tatric?”

“Boy, you’d have to understand what you're doing. You’d be on the run. They’ll try to grab you. You certainly couldn’t come back here any time soon. If they ever laid a hand on you, you’d be right back where you started, except working for an annoyed government instead of a guilty one. You’d get the worst posts. They wouldn’t call it a punishment.”

“But it would be,” Garrick added in. “And you’d know it. That’s the choice, Marco. You can let them treat you like a murderer, or you can become a bit of a criminal to prove you aren’t.”

“Oh.” The brand-new marauder let his eyes fall to the ground. “Why now, though? You two talk about these classes like they are normal to see, but I’ve never seen one before.”

“That’s because this island doesn’t have much in the way of evil, son.” Tatric waved his arm out over their home. “Usually, the classes come from what a person does. Their wishes. Their habits. And it has to be pretty strong for it to get past the system, I hear.”

“But I’m not a criminal!” Marco’s face was burning. People had accused him of being dumb, lots of times. But bad wasn’t something he had been called before. He didn’t steal. He didn’t break things or even fight outside the lessons he had been given. “I’m really not.”

“I know, boy. Don’t be an idiot.” Tatric shook his head. “Everyone who gave it any thought knows. Something else is happening here. Believe me that I’ll be looking into it.”

“I will too,” Garrick said. “But not today. Today, you have a decision to make about whether or not you want to stay and be safe, or go and be free.”

Marco ran the emotional numbers in his head, and came to a specific conclusion very quickly. It wasn’t hard when he valued one particular goal an infinite amount.

“Yeah. I’m doing this, then. At least I’ll be at sea,” Marco said.

For just a moment, Tatric really looked his age. He sagged under the weight of countless decades. Just as quickly, he was back, looking old but strong, aged, but immortal.

“Then get to work, boy,” the dockmaster grunted.

“Me? What about you?”

“We are a dockhand and a ship’s captain, boy. What the hell do you think we know about carpentry?” Tatric rubbed his storage bag, withdrawing the much bigger bag of tools he used to keep the docks and shack from falling apart. “We’ll help, but you need the experience. Get started, and we’ll stand guard.”

“But…”

Tatric slapped him on the back with a fatherly spirit, but also enough force to rattle Marco’s teeth.

“If you can’t do this, you can’t go. This is a damn walk in the park compared to what will come after, Marco. You said you made your decision. Now, do you want this, or not?”

He did. He got to work.