Dust rose above the treeline.
The captain heard the explosions before he saw the light.
They rolled through the ground beneath his feet and up through his legs, and he stopped walking and put a hand out to his crewmate beside him without thinking about it, steadying them both.
Then more light came over the treeline.
Not the soft orange of fire, though there was fire in it somewhere. Something brighter, a total white light that bleached the shadows from the trees and threw everything into sharp relief for a single sustained moment before it faded.
Then came more.
Closer, farther, larger, and lesser, it was difficult to tell which was which. The sound of it reached them a moment later, a deep concussive pressure that he felt in his chest more than heard with his ears, and the trees nearest them shook with it, leaves falling in the sudden silence that followed.
"Keep moving!" the captain yelled out to the hoards of people he had freed from the cells that were imprisoned in total darkness.
Breaking in was easier than expected as there was no security, and any locks would only keep an honest thief out.
The captain wasn't, and he felt a pressure on him that he had never felt before.
Another light bloomed in the distance, over the treeline, brilliant and brief.
He didn't look at it.
He had two hours, and whatever the sorceress was doing behind him was her business, and the people that he herded out of that gray structure were his.
He had learned enough tonight to know which problems were his to solve and which ones had already been handled.
He kept on yelling.
There were many.
He had expected a lot, but not this many.
They came out of that gray structure in a slow stream that kept going longer than the captain liked.
Each one of them looked at the open sky above them with the same expression of disbelief and careful hope. They had learned not to trust things that seemed too good, and they were trying very hard not to start now.
He didn't know if they could understand what he was saying, but he used his hands and direction of his body to keep them going, which seemed like it was enough:
They followed.
They followed without question, without hesitation, without anything that looked like suspicion.
But it seemed like they decided that he wasn't here to hurt them.
He wasn't a good man, particularly. He had done things for money that he didn't examine too closely in the light of day. He had looked the other way more times than he could count, at more things than he cared to name.
But they looked at him like he was something worth following.
He could be that, he thought, just for tonight.
Another concussion rolled through the air behind them, and several of the people flinched and huddled closer together without stopping, and he moved through them with his hands out, not touching, as they didn't respond well to that.
The treeline thinned ahead.
He could see the dock through the last of the trees, the torches still burning, the water beyond them dark and quiet.
He counted the ships as soon as he could see them.
Three.
His crew had found two more, both smaller than his own but neither small, and he could see figures moving on all of them in the torchlight, his people, doing what his people did when given a task and a deadline, which was to get it done without being told twice.
He hoped that that was enough. It definitely wasn't going to be comfortable.
He looked back at the group still emerging from the treeline behind him, the long, straggling line of them, pale and blinking and holding onto each other where they could.
He hoped his crew had found food. He hoped they had found water, blankets, anything.
He suspected they had. They were good at finding things when the need was clear enough.