The Trafalgars kept him for three full days before Lira was satisfied that his ribs were stable enough to travel on. He had not argued past the first day, partly because arguing with Lira was a project with a low success rate, and partly because the spare room was comfortable and the meals were good and there were genuinely worse places to recover from cracked ribs than a warm house belonging to two competent physicians.
On the morning of the fourth day he said goodbye at the door, thanked them both in the brief way he thanked people when he meant it, and turned toward the dock. He had made it perhaps twenty steps down the street when Lira's voice carried out through the open window behind him, warm and entirely uninhibited, telling Rocco that he would need to put in considerably more effort in the coming months because she had decided she wanted a child as soon as possible.
Lucien walked faster.
He reached the dock, checked that his boat was where he had left it, and got in without looking back. He rowed until Flevance had shrunk to a pale smudge on the horizon and then disappeared entirely, leaving nothing behind it but open water and the faint metallic memory of the smell.
He stopped rowing, reached into his coat, and pulled out the small log pose he had bought cheaply at the Flevance port market before leaving. The needle trembled for a moment, then settled, pointing steadily northwest.
He looked at it for a while. The island his father had directed him toward was northwest, which the log pose confirmed. Going directly, at his current pace, would take roughly two months of continuous rowing. He turned that thought over and found it unsatisfying in a way he could not immediately argue with.
The whole point of leaving had been to see what was out there. Arriving somewhere by rowing in a straight line for two months, head down and shoulders aching, was not that.
He pocketed the log pose and looked out at the water.
SIX MONTHS LATER
"Finally, one without breaking something in the process." Lucien crouched and finished tying the man's wrists, then straightened and looked down at him with the mild satisfaction of a job that had gone exactly as planned. "I genuinely do not understand why criminals stay in one place. You are on the ocean. The ocean is enormous. And yet here you are, on the same island, doing the same thing, every week, until someone comes to collect you."
The man said nothing. He had the deflated expression of someone who had recently lost an argument with a person considerably younger than himself and had not yet finished processing it.
It had been over half a year since Lucien left Flevance. He was nearly thirteen now, and the six months since the White City had been more genuinely interesting than the previous twelve years combined, which he considered a reasonable return on the decision.
He had gone wherever the log pose or simple curiosity pointed him, taking bounties when the money ran low and moving on when an island ran out of things worth looking at, which most of them did eventually.
He had seen things that unsettled him during that time, enough to understand that the sea had edges worth respecting. None of it had frightened him. All of it had made him want to be stronger, not out of fear but out of the practical understanding that freedom and weakness were poor companions.
He hoisted the man to his feet with one hand and started toward the Marine outpost at the edge of the town. He was taller than he had been leaving home, and the training had continued without interruption across every island he had stopped at long enough to run a proper circuit.
He still looked lean, especially beside the considerably larger man he was currently escorting, but lean had stopped meaning anything useful as a descriptor once he could lift people without notable effort.
"Young lad, you keep surprising me more and more every day." The officer behind the counter leaned forward on his elbows as Lucien came through the door, the man slung over his shoulder like an inconvenient piece of luggage. "The third one since you came here and it hasn't even been seven days. You don't have them stored somewhere, do you? Some kind of underground arrangement?"
Lucien dropped the man onto the counter with a thud and straightened up. "These ones do most of the work themselves, honestly. This particular individual spent two consecutive days at the same brothel with an active bounty on his head. He was not making any preparations to leave." He paused. "If you have a bounty and you are not either running or strong enough to hold your ground, you should at minimum vary your location. That is just basic reasoning."
The officer stared at him for a moment, then at the man slumped across his counter, then back at Lucien.
"You're thirteen," he said.
"Nearly," Lucien said. "The paperwork, if you don't mind."
The officer processed the claim with the efficiency he had developed over the past week of dealings with Lucien, stamped the form, and slid the reward, 30,000 berries across the counter without further comment. Lucien counted it, pocketed it, and turned to leave.
"You know," the officer said, "at this rate you'll have your own poster before long."
Lucien glanced back at him. He hadn't considered it from that angle before. A bounty meant the Marines had noticed you, which meant a certain kind of reputation had preceded you, which meant people would either avoid you or come looking for you depending on their disposition. He turned the implications over briefly.
"Probably," he said, and walked out.
He made his way to the dock and found his boat where he had left it, which was no longer the same boat his father had put him in. That one had not survived a hunt roughly two months back, when he had tracked a target into the water and the fight had moved in several directions at once and the small rowboat had simply not been built for whatever that engagement became. It had gone down with a kind of quiet dignity that he had found almost respectful given the circumstances.
The replacement had cost him the entire bounty from that job, which had been painful in a precise and specific way. But the sailboat was considerably more practical. It was old and not especially attractive, but it had a mast and a working sail and a small cabin below deck that he had fitted with a narrow bed, a hook for the lantern, and a flat surface to write on.
After months of sleeping in the open rowboat with his coat pulled over him, the cabin felt almost unreasonably comfortable.
He stepped aboard, checked the sail, and looked northwest.
His destination was the Lvneel Kingdom.