As soon as the door closed behind him, the woman’s forehead hit the tabletop.

“Marco, you sure do bring me interesting problems,” she said. “I don’t think you realize just how close that was.”

“I got a sense. What are the normal rules of parlay, anyway?”

“It’s an obscure law,” Elisa explained. “Parlay with a stationary target, like a settlement, comes with some risk for the island. When parlaying, they have to allow a certain number of troops on their shores, and it gives the ships time to maneuver and prepare. So the other side has to go a certain distance away directly after the meeting. It’s pretty far.”

“It would be further for anyone but Frisk. Remember that ship of his eats up distance very quickly.” The old woman stood. “We probably have about four hours, and I want to save an hour of that. Three hours. That’s not much time.”

“Time for what?” Riv said. “To dig our own graves?”

“Nothing that serious, I’d say.” The old woman opened the door as she strode out into the open. “But there is some digging involved. We are going to see your temple.”

The old woman marched out at a clip they could all keep up with, a brisk walk that seemed to promise to wear her out before too long. That promise was not kept. After ten minutes were up, the old woman had only increased her pace as she took them over increasingly challenging terrain. Her stride never broke no matter how the steep the slope got or how overgrown the ground became, and no matter how much the kids behind her tripped over themselves to try and keep up.

“Don’t worry. We’re getting there quicker, even if it doesn’t seem like it. I’ve had to walk up and down to this damned thing plenty since you left on your little trip. This is the quickest way,” the woman said.

That turned out to be true, and they were in sight of the temple long, long before Marco thought it was possible. Even more impossible-seeming was how much of the temple was unearthed now. A good two stories worth of building had been uncovered with the promise of more still hiding beneath the earth, and it seemed the hill they had found it in would be more than halved by the time they were done.

“It’s huge.” Aethe looked at the temple with wide eyes. “It’s not Elvish either. Who else has been here long enough to build something like this?”

“We have no idea. I’ve asked my scholars the same thing, and they say there must have been someone here before humans were. Before civilization as we know it, someone else slapped this up.”

“Is that true?” Riv asked. “It sounds like the kind of pile someone makes up when they just don’t know.”

“It’s possible.” The old woman walked up to the temple and touched the side of it. “But it is old. Very old. What’s more, we have a bit of an idea of what it’s for. Any time one of us touches it, we get this message.”

She unrolled a parchment and handed it over to Marco. There, in a handwritten mockup of a system screen, was a message.

“You see why I dragged you up here. The temple has been remarkably empty so far. I’ve had almost everyone on the island touch it in the past few days, just in case one of them had stepped on it before you four did. No luck.” The woman stepped to the side. “Well, go ahead. I think I’ve waited long enough and the curiosity is just eating away at me.”

Rive, Elisa, Aethe and Marco exchanged looks but approached the temple as one and laid their hands down on it. The resulting message popped up immediately, at least for Marco.

“It’s different, at least,” Marco said after he read the message. “I have no idea what it does but it says it won’t do it until it’s dig out. And…”

“Huh. So.” Marco looked at the old woman. “I don’t know how to say this exactly, but we might have some bad news. Not the worst, but pretty bad, and…”

“Just spit it out, boy. I don’t have enough time left to live that you should waste it this way,” the woman said.

“I think he just doesn’t want to pile it up on you with how your afternoon has already been,” Elisa said, stepping in to cover Marco. “Go easy on him.”

“Fine. Let’s head back first, we’ll need to hurry.”

They talked as they walked back home. There was still time left before they hit the three-hour limit the old woman had imposed, but none of them felt like there was plenty of time.

“It’s bad news,” the woman said. “I had hoped to just have you leave and circle around a bit before sneaking back in. We could have hidden you for a few months. Even someone like Frisk has limits to their persistence. Now we have a problem.”

“Steed.” Marco looked around. “The island’s going to be attacked by a pirate armada?”

“Soon enough. Frisk won’t buy it when I tell him he coincidentally can’t look for you because the island is about to be hit by hundreds of pirate ships right after he was here for the parlay. I wouldn’t.”

“Weren’t you setting up cannons? A whole battery of them?” Riv asked. “I could have sworn I saw some coming in.”

“We are, but there’s a limit to what those can do. Especially with that many targets. We can’t blanket the entire ocean. Most of those ships would make landfall.”

“Aren’t you really tough?” Marco asked.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. But even the toughest person can’t stop an entire army. The greater part of it would flow around me. You think those scholars can fight? Our cooks?”

“The cooks, yes,” Aethe said.

“It was a bad example.” The woman didn’t even skip a beat as she moved on. “The point is that I can’t tolerate that much loss. Neither can you. There would be no place to come back to. Now shh. I need to plan.”

They trotted along in silence until they got back to the village. It didn’t take a genius to see that the old woman was thinking, and with everything hanging on her next idea, nobody wanted to interrupt her.

“Okay,” she said after a while. “Here’s my thinking. We have two problems and two solutions. The first is Frisk. He’s not going to stand by as pirates start attacking. He’ll help, but his first mission is to find you. So he’ll do that before turning around to fight the pirates. But knowing you are here like he does, it’s probably not going to be that hard for Frisk to track you a bit. If he knows that you aren’t on the island and doesn’t know exactly where you are, then he’ll help fight the pirates before turning back to you. You need to get to cover.”

“Cover?”

“An island. Or something.” The old woman waved her hand absentmindedly. “Skills that track things on the water don’t generally work well near land. It’s why pirates and those on the run hide out on terra firma in the first place. The problem is, there’s only one island particularly close to you, and you already know why it’s a problem.”

Only a few hours away was an enormous island with plenty of little hidden bays they could hide their ship in, one that they could almost for sure navigate to. The only issue was that it was more loaded with buccaneers, pirates, and various kinds of seagoing ne’er-do-wells than a hornet nest had hornets.

“What would we even do there?” Aethe said. “This sounds like suicide, and I’ve just recently started being a person in the singular. I like it. I don’t want to get chopped into pieces yet.”

“Well, I won’t say it’s not dangerous. But less so than you might think. There’s no way the pirates expect you to invade. That they’d expect anyone to, really. In a fleet that large, nobody will know everyone. You might be able to walk around without being recognized, since nobody has seen your face.”

“Well, two people have,” Marco said. “Maybe more. The survivors from the first attack on the floating bar and that ship we chased when we found the island in the first place. Our ship looks a bit different now, but it’s going to catch some extra glances.”

“And that’s the second problem. The pirates. Even if Frisk helps, and that’s a big if, we want to have our own assurances against them. We can’t just wait as they come to us.” The woman walked towards a small building, a sort of shed-sized storehouse. “I’m thinking you’d want this.”

“This?” Marco took the bucket of black material she handed over. “What is this?”

“It’s a special incendiary. Ask your friend. But with it, you could do some real damage to the pirate. The best plan I can come up with is you sneaking into the pirate base, taking a day laying down the incendiary so that Frisk heads towards the pirates and meets them head-first, and then hightail it back and help us with the defense. We’ll spend our time putting up more cannons. As many as we can fire. We’ll give them hell like they’ve never seen before.”

“And that will work?”

“It had better,” the old woman said. “I’m betting it all on you, kid, all at once. If this works out, I’ll get everything I want. If it doesn’t, it’s only fair I get nothing.”

Ten minutes later, they were out on the water. Marco had Aethe on the prow, keeping an eye on every angle besides those the island covered as they made a beeline for the pirate island.

“We’ll hit it here.” Elisa pointed to a side of the island almost at a right angle to the main docks. “That way it’s a close run from their settlement, but far enough that they aren’t likely to find the ship. As long as they don’t see our ship, we should be safe.”

“And then?”

“And then we sneak in. We need to be hidden in that town somewhere by nightfall.”

“I don’t understand. Is it because of that stuff?” Marco nodded towards the bucket. “What even is it?”

“A special kind of tar. I never thought I’d see it outside of a book. The dungeon that rewarded it shut down, so it’s effectively extinct,” Elisa said. “It’s called Ghost Fuse.”

She spent the rest of the time sailing to the island explaining the entire plan as she understood it, and then refining what they should expect.

“Is any of this going to be relevant once we get there?” Riv asked. “This plan seems like it couldn’t possibly hold together once anything goes wrong.”

“It won’t,” Aethe said. “But it gives us an idea for a lot of situations. Thank you, Elisa.”

When they got to the island, the hairs on the back of Marco’s neck stood up and refused to lay back down during the entire approach. All it would take would be one pirate coming around the island at the wrong time or one person high enough on the island’s central peak to see them, and the whole armada would come crashing down on them. They couldn’t outrun all of them, and they couldn’t fight anywhere near all of them. It wouldn’t be over immediately, but they almost certainly wouldn’t see the next sundown. Somehow, against all odds, that failed to happen. They floated placidly up to a surprisingly deep inlet in the island and were deep into the cover of overhanging mangrove trees before he finally allowed himself to take a breath.

“Well, that’s the first part of it,” he said. “Somebody remind me what the second is, and let’s get working on it right away.”