After a time, Riggs glanced around to find himself alone except for Prath, who was approaching from belowdecks.

He came to stand beside Riggs, resting his huge, scarred hands on the railing along the bow. They stood in silence for a long time; the calm quiet was a relief to Riggs after the excitement and crowd of the morning.

He hadn’t realized he’d decided to speak out loud until the words were already coming out.

“Why’d you leave the army?” Riggs asked. He figured Prath would appreciate directness, since the man himself seemed to waste no words.

“They let me go home when I got this,” he rumbled, rubbing the scar running across the left side of his face.

“When did you… What made you decide to turn against the Empire with us?”

Prath didn’t answer.

“Was it the prisoners?” He ventured, hoping he hadn’t offended the man somehow.

Prath shook his head. “No.”

Riggs stayed silent. He thought if Prath wanted to have this discussion, he’d do so without being led.

He was about to apologize and give Prath some space when the ex-soldier spoke, eyes glued to the waves.

“They make it sound like you’ll be a hero. That you’re doing something noble, fighting against savages that would just as soon slit our throats. They said we were protecting our lands, our families, our livelihood. It’s how they get people to join. I wanted to be a hero.”

A pause.

“That’s not how it was. Those people, the Ishak,” he said, forming the unfamiliar word clumsily, “they saw us coming and they were terrified. Most of them surrendered as soon as we entered their villages.”

Riggs was reminded of Felda’s story about his father.

“The only reason they’ve held onto the land they have is because of their enchanters. They only have about one in every hundred, but that’s enough. I don’t blame them. They were just protecting their families and homes.”

He never tore his gaze from the waves.

“I don’t know what that girl has told you about what she can do. Maybe she doesn’t know what they did. She says she mostly grew up in Nurak. So she probably doesn’t know.”

“Know what?” Riggs ventured.

“The true enchanters in the north were… creative. They’d put a hand on you and change your heart into a stone, or change your blood into water.”

Gods above, Riggs thought.

“They could wipe out so many so fast before someone would manage to cut off their head. I saw one change a man’s sword to acid in his hand. They sent him home after that.”

“Prath?”

The man didn’t turn. “Yeah.”

Riggs breathed deeply. “How do you go on after seeing things like that? After killing people?”

Prath stood silently for what felt like several minutes. Riggs waited.

“You just do. You either just keep existing, or you take your sword and end yourself with it.”

“I killed a guard in Paoli,” Riggs blurted.

“You did what you had to.”

“Wasn’t he doing the same, though?” Riggs turned to face Prath. “Is one of us right? If we’d both kill each other for going against what we each think is the right thing?”

“Banner and his family have killed thousands, hundreds of thousands of Ishak over three generations, maybe even a million. For what, exactly? What did the Ishak do to his Empire?” Prath shook his head. “They existed. The ones they don’t kill, they take as slaves. They don’t live past thirty most of the time.”

Riggs thought of when Dex had described the shed she’d lived in for the first six years of her life.

“The women, they use them how they want. You think Banner is bad? You should see these soldiers, the ones that are fed his propaganda their whole lives saying the Ishak are animals, are sub-human. Saying they’re pagan and filthy and don’t have souls in their bodies. People you’d walk past in the streets of the Capitol, just normal men. When they’re out there, in the freezing cold with boots that stay wet for four months straight, their minds turn against them. The Ishak become those animals, those demons without souls. Some of them even…” Prath cut off, shaking his head. “Anything you do against Banner and his believers is the right thing to do.”

“If the bad guy is Banner, why do our people have to die for what he’s done, what he’s doing still?” Riggs asked. His tone wasn’t angry or argumentative. It was resigned. “You can say my killing that guard was a strike against Banner, but why do I have to kill guards and soldiers and spies to strike at him? Why does anyone have to kill at all?”

Prath didn’t respond.

“I think I know why,” Riggs said softly. “Because Banner wants us to kill each other. He wants the bloodshed and the pillaging because it’s all happening because of him. It’s his twisted, fucked up way of being immortal, putting his mark on the world, saying ‘I was here, and look at all that happened because of it’. Responding with killing his men back is exactly what he wants.”

Prath turned his head and looked at Captain Riggs.

“Are you going to do something about it?” It was not a goad; Prath was genuinely asking.

Riggs looked out at the waves.

He thought about the sea and its vastness, its laziness, its continuance. No matter what men did with their lives, the sea was always there, wearing away at rocky beaches, salting the air, keeping alive the things that dwelled within.

He envied the sea. All it had to do was be. No matter what wars men fought, no matter who loved who and ate this food or that or talked this way or that, the sea just bounced ships with its caressing waves and wore away at the tide forever and ever.

Riggs wished he could just be. He wanted to sail on the Silverwing, seeing new lands, meeting all kinds of people. He wanted to hear Huss’s stories and eat Dain’s chocolate bread and tell Torn no, he couldn’t tie himself to the ship and let it pull him in the sea like a fishing lure.

He wanted to laugh and smile and cry and love, to hold a woman and know he could keep her safe from the horrors of the world.

And he thought about how, while he had some of those things now, he wouldn’t always, because eventually he’d have to either return to the Empire or maybe try hiding among the Ishak up north or hope there was somewhere he could escape to here in the south and live out the rest of his life never thinking of Banner and his Empire again.

But if he did that, his crew would never see their families and their homes again.

Even if they sat at the black rotting heart of an Empire that gets its power from the bloody corpses of innocent Ishak, those were their families and taking them away from them would be just like killing them because that’s what it means to be killed, it means you never see those you care about ever again and they never see you again either.

Riggs returned to his body, feeling the salty wind tousle his brown curls, teasing as if it would lift his father’s- no, his- hat from his head, but it never actually did. He felt his bare feet on the warm wood, the railing beneath his hands. He realized there were tears on his cheeks.

They stayed there as he turned to Prath and found the man watching him.

Captain Riggs released a deep breath into the sea air and spoke one word. “Yes.”