The new skill levels meant Marco was sailing a tiny bit faster and would have been exciting in any other situation. It only delayed the inevitable.

“Ahoy.” A large man appeared at the rail of the sloop chasing him. He was a real captain, or at least had that look. He even had the hat for it. “Are you…”

The man glanced down at a small logbook in his hand.

“Marco? From Gulf Isle?”

Marco shot with his cannon. Running away had given him at least that much time. Garrick had only had one cannonball left, but he had kept the powder dry and sealed in its keg.

“Hey!” the man yelled. The cannonball had done nothing to his ship besides leaving a small dent in the paint. “Stop that!”

“I’m not coming with you!” Marco waved his rapier threateningly. “I’ll die first!”

“Nobody is asking you to, you little psychopath!” The captain was heating up now. “For all I care, you can drown. I was hired to find you. Not take you anywhere.”

This was a puzzler. Marco wasn’t equipped mentally or emotionally to figure it out. He continued brandishing his sword at the ship, wishing Elisa was there to solve the mystery.

Then, suddenly, she was.

“I knew it. I was so mad at those old men when they told me what they had done. You tried to sail straight to Knife Rock, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.” Marco eyed her suspiciously. “Why?”

“You sailed straight there from an unfamiliar part of the coast, idiot. You’re going in the wrong direction.”

Marco opened his mouth as confidently as if he had a dozen reasons why he was right. They all evaporated at once.

I guess I did always plan on leaving from the dock, and then it’s just a straight shot away from the island, but… damn. Damn. Does the coast curve that much?

“Like I said. Everyone on the island is an idiot but me.” Elisa glanced up at the still annoyed captain. “Except you, sir. And you, father.”

Elisa’s dad appeared over the railing as well. He was a tall Bookbinder, a quiet one that hardly ever went outside. Marco barely knew him.

“Well, you’re here, dear,” the man said. “Say what you had to say.”

“Oh, right. I’m very sorry, father.”

With no hesitation at all, Elisa put a foot on the railing and launched herself into the air, landing on the edge of The Foolish Endeavor and almost capsizing it. Marco caught her arm and yanked her in before she fell into the water and drowned.

“Elisa? What in the world are you doing?” her father yelled.

“I’m going with him, dad. Sorry.”

“Like hell you are. Captain, get her back, now.”

“He can’t.” Elisa put her hands on her hips and drew herself to her full height, almost capsizing the ship again. Marco worked feverishly in the background to keep it right-side-up. “Marco welcomed me onto his ship. Didn’t you, Marco?”

“Well, I mean…”

Elisa kicked him.

“Didn’t you, Marco?” She hissed.

“Sure.” Marco rubbed his arm. “Whatever you say.”

“And as he is not a criminal or a fugitive, and has committed no act of aggression…” Elisa continued.

“He shot a cannon at me!” the captain yelled. “Right at my ship!”

“You will find that a cannon this small qualifies as a toy under maritime law.” Elisa smiled. “Plus, boarding a client’s boat will ruin your reputation.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” the captain said.

“I won’t have to. Because you won’t board.” Elisa’s voice went steely. Marco shuddered as the weight of a thousand childhood scoldings settled on him like a phantom pain. “Or maybe you will. And I think then you’ll both find I can be very loud about things that upset me.”

The captain looked at her appraisingly, then decided she was probably ready to back up her threat.

“Come, sir.” He turned to Elisa’s father. “Below decks. I’ll give you some whisky.”

“You have to get her!” Elisa’s father wailed. Marco’s ship had drifted far enough now that there was no hope of jumping to it anymore. “I’m paying you!”

“Not enough.” The captain disappeared from view as he climbed below decks. “When you’re ready for that drink, just let me know.”

The captain gone, Elisa’s father leaned over and hissed at her, as if he was trying to keep what he was saying next a secret.

“You know he’s dangerous,” her father said. “You showed me that poster.”

Stolen story; please report.

“I didn’t show you anything, father.” Elisa rolled her eyes. “You snuck up behind me while I was reading.”

“It makes little difference if the boy is what that document claimed, Elisa.” Her father’s voice dripped with parental condescension. “What if it’s true?”

“Father, you know it isn’t.” Elisa subtly nudged Marco towards the wheel, where he laid just a hand on it to coax the ship into moving a bit more into the wind. The prow began to catch a bit more water as the ship gained momentum away from its pursuer. “If it was, you wouldn’t be bothering to whisper. Marco never did anything like that.”

“Why are you drifting off?” Her father seemed reluctant to actually accuse Marco of whatever the mysterious document said he had done. “Come back here, Elisa!”

“Don’t worry, father! I’ll be fine!” Elisa waved. “I left a letter for you and mother. I’ll visit!”

“When?” Her father was pacing the deck. “When, Elisa?”

The wind kicked up, drawing them rapidly away from the ship. Elisa put her foot on the tiller and pointed the ship exactly away from her father.

“At some future point!” she yelled. “I promise!”

Marco had a lot of courage, but only a limited capacity to tolerate shock. It was a full minute later that he found the words to express exactly what he wanted to say.

“Elisa.” He turned to her calmly. “What just happened?”

“I joined your crew,” she said.

“You can’t,” he stated.

“You can’t drown me, so I’m on the ship until you find land. Unless you want that to be the land of the dead, then you need me to navigate.”

“Which you can’t do.”

Elisa smiled and reached into her bag, from which she extracted a small curved tool. She lifted it to the sky a bit, looked at it, then made some notes on a piece of paper.

“Go that way.” She pointed to her left. “For the rest of the day, and overnight. We’ll have land by dawn.”

“Liar.”

“You can say that later, after there’s no land.” Elisa reached into her pouch and pulled out a few large flasks of water and some dried provisions, stowing them under one of the ship's small benches. “If there isn’t, I’ll apologize and go home. But I’d be getting ready to apologize myself, if I were you.”

—

The short few hours that made up the rest of the day went quickly for time spent on a small, almost empty craft in the middle of an uneventful, featureless ocean. Elisa passed the time by recounting in great detail the pains she had gone to con her father into chartering a boat to find Marco. She had always been able to play him like a fiddle, but this had apparently been a step above even that. This time, she had bent the man to her will like a virtuoso performing on a fine violin.

After that, it was just a matter of doing what nobody else looking for him could do and guessing where he’d be. Only she out of an entire island of interested people had been able to predict where he was incorrectly heading, and from that deduce exactly where he was.

“You mentioned a document,” Marco finally said, once her storytelling had died down. They were lit only by stars and the moon now, with only the quiet sounds of the water to fill their ears. “Your father seemed to think it was pretty important.”

When Elisa was reluctant to talk about something, it meant it was both very important and a little bit unpleasant. Once, she had noticeably avoided talking about something for a week, and it was only by persistent nagging that Marco had been able to learn her father was planning on moving away from Gulf Isle. That plan had fallen through, but he had learned not to let stuff pass that long. Elisa would avoid things until they burned out of her like an acid. Getting them out quickly was a good policy.

“Well, maybe.” She shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “But he’s crazy.”

“He’s not crazy, he’s just… confused,” Marco stated. The man had once forgotten to emerge from his office for a week, sustaining himself with stale cookies as he worked through a particularly dense tome and ignored all of Elisa’s efforts to pry him out of his chair. Confused was the nicest way Marco could come up with to put it. “And you are avoiding the question.”

“It’s…” Elisa seemed to see the determination on his face and, sighing, gave up. “It’s this. Just don’t freak out, okay?”

She handed him a piece of parchment about as long as his forearm. It was impossible to miss the most prominent feature on it, given that it was a painting of his own face. The likeness was good, even if Marco wasn’t sure he ever made quite so murderously angry a face as the picture’s expression implied he did. The text was hardly better.

Marco read over the most deadly, damning parts of the document a few times before the weirder aspects of it started to stand out to him more. Carefully controlling his voice to try and keep from sounding freaked out in the way Elisa wanted to avoid, he kept his eyes on the wanted poster as he asked the most pressing question.

“Is it just me, or is that worded oddly?” Marco asked.

“Oh, you caught that. What do you find weirdest?”

“It sounds like they don’t want to directly accuse me of anything. But at the same time, they want to have everyone believe I killed someone.” Marco winced. “Do they? I mean the people on the island.”

“Nobody who knows you. I heard the lady at the bread shop say she couldn’t imagine someone who exercises that much even having time to kill anyone. But nobody else is going to notice the lie. Most bounty hunters aren’t even going to care.” Elisa brushed her hair out of her face. “That’s not the big problem, though. The government’s preference is.”

“Yeah, what’s that about? I thought capture was just assumed.”

“It is, usually. This is something trickier. It’s like… the government explains you are a murderer, a dangerous one. They then say their preference is that you stay alive.”

“And?”

“Bounty hunters don’t care much about preferences. They care about eliminating risk. Any bounty hunter who doesn’t want to go to the trouble of locking you up will add a few extra holes in your chest.”

“So any bounty hunter with the poster will try to kill me?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Marco put his attention on the ship’s wheel for a few seconds. He couldn’t quite feel any of the one-with-the-boat effects his class was supposed to give him yet, but that was to be expected. Anything that was happening right now was bound to be subtle, if he was enhancing the ship at all.

“Why?” Marco thought back to the graveyard. He hadn’t quite let the implications of what Tatric and Garrick had shown him sink in yet. The wanted poster was forcing reality in whether he wanted to know or not. “Why would they want me gone so badly?”

“I don’t know, Marco. I just know we can’t let them catch you. No matter what happens.”

Elisa curled up against the rail and went to sleep not long after that. She had just been through a very long, very demanding day by her standards. Marco, in contrast, was boiling over with energy. He hadn’t run so much as a single stride in days. His body didn’t know what to do with all the movement he wasn’t about to let out.

But the open sea at night was not an interesting place. There was a healthy wind to catch in the sails of the little ship, the night sky was clear, and after an hour of sailing he could no longer really see much of anything on the horizon. After Elisa fell asleep, It was just him and the sound of water, perfectly calm and still.