Small Debts and Smaller Boats

The Inn's breakfast had looked at them from the plate with the specific energy of something that had made poor decisions about its own existence, and by unspoken mutual agreement they had left it untouched, paid for the room, and walked into the Kugane morning in search of something that smelled like actual food.

The market was already alive, vendors calling out in a mix of Hingan and the common tongue, the smell of grilled things and sweet things and something fermented that Yucca was choosing not to investigate mixing together in the warm morning air. She walked with both hands in the wide sleeves of the light kimono she had bought two days prior, her ears moving independently as they always did in crowded spaces, cataloguing exits and persons of interest out of a habit so old it had stopped feeling like effort.

"Something with rice." She said. "And fish. And nothing that looked at me from the plate this morning."

"The eggs were fine."

"The eggs were sentient and I refuse to discuss them further."

She was looking at a stall selling small clay cups of something hot and fragrant when she felt the small hand at her hip. Precise, quick, two fingers finding the small pouch she kept at her sash with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this many times. She felt it happen completely and said nothing, her expression not changing, her eyes staying on the clay cups.

Lev, walking half a step behind her, had gone still.

She purchased two cups of whatever the hot fragrant thing was and turned to hand him one with the serenity of someone who had noticed nothing whatsoever.

He looked at her.

She sipped her drink.

"Yucca."

"It is very good, try it."

"Someone just robbed you."

"Did they?" She cupped the drink in both hands and looked out at the market with an expression of mild contentment. "Mm."

He waited. She could feel him waiting, which was one of the things about him she had stopped finding irritating and started finding almost companionable. He was very good at waiting.

"I saw him before he saw me." She said, still looking at the market. "He is about eight. Barefoot. The sole of his left sandal is held together with what appears to be market twine. He has been following us since the fish stall." She took another sip. "The pouch had three gil in it. I do not keep anything valuable in the obvious pouch."

A beat.

"I know why children steal." She said, simply. "I do not particularly feel like stopping him today."

Lev said nothing. She appreciated that.

They found a stall selling rice bowls with grilled fish and ate standing at the corner of the market street, watching the morning move around them, and Yucca had just decided that Kugane's mornings were among the better ones she had experienced when she heard the commotion from three stalls down.

A child's voice, high and frightened. An adult voice, loud and indignant. And the particular sharp tone of official authority clearing space in a crowd.

She was moving before she had finished deciding to.

The boy was perhaps eight, which she had estimated correctly, with dark hair and wide eyes and the specific frozen expression of someone who had exhausted their options. The guard had him by the collar. The merchant, a round-faced man in expensive fabric who had the look of someone who had been waiting for an excuse to be this upset about something, was making his case at considerable volume.

"Cut the hand." The merchant said. "It is the law. The boy is a thief and I want the law applied."

Yucca inserted herself between the merchant and the guard with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this particular kind of thing since before she was this boy's age.

"Good morning." She said, in her most reasonable voice. "I understand there has been a misunderstanding."

"There has been no misunderstanding." The merchant said, looking at her with the specific irritation of someone whose dramatic scene has been interrupted. "That child stole from my stall."

"What did he take?"

"A jade toggle. Worth twenty gil. Small enough to pocket, which is exactly what he did."

Yucca looked at the boy. The boy looked at her with enormous eyes, the toggle clearly visible where it had been hastily shoved into the fold of his sash. She looked back at the merchant.

"I will pay for it." She said.

"This is not about the gil." The merchant said, in the tone of a man who it was absolutely about the gil for. "This is about the principle."

"How wonderful." Yucca said. "I love principles. I find they become much more flexible when there is a better offer on the table." She tilted her head. "The boy pays his debt and you receive compensation plus something additional for your trouble. The guard goes back to doing something useful. Everyone's morning improves." She paused. "I do not currently have twenty gil on me that I am willing to part with, but I am a licensed adventurer available for work, which in my experience is worth considerably more than twenty gil if the job is right." She looked at the merchant steadily. "What do you need done?"

The merchant looked at her. Then at Lev, looming behind her with the particular quality of presence that large armed beings have in negotiations. Then back at her.

"I have a problem." He said, slowly. "At sea."

His name was Hirotsugu and his problem was this. Something in the waters off the coast had been attacking ships for three weeks. Two vessels sunk, four sailors dead, and his import and export business had ground to a halt because no crew would sail the route. The harbourmaster had been unhelpful. Even the Maelstrom had been called and found nothing. Whatever it was, it came at night, it came from below, and the one survivor who had seen it had described something with arms the length of the ship and an eye the size of a cartwheel.

"A giant squid." Yucca said.

"So they say."

She looked at Lev. "Can you shoot a giant squid?"

"I have never tried." He said. "But I can try anything once."

She looked back at the merchant. "We will need a boat. Small enough to move quickly. Supplies for two days. And the debt of the boy is cleared completely, plus you pay us in full upon completion." She named a number. The merchant made a face. She named the same number again with the patience of someone who had already decided it was not moving. The merchant agreed.

She turned to the guard, who had been holding the boy's collar throughout this entire exchange with the expression of someone waiting for instructions.

"Release him." She said.

The guard looked at the merchant. The merchant nodded, grudgingly. The boy was released and stood rubbing his neck and staring at Yucca with an expression she recognized because she had worn it herself, once, a long time ago, in front of a woman who had also stepped between her and a consequence she had not been able to afford.

"Come on then." She said to the boy. "You can give me back my three gil while we walk."

His name was Kotaro and he was eight and three-quarters, which he specified, and he had been living near the docks for two years with a shifting population of other children in similar circumstances, a small informal arrangement by which they pooled what they acquired and kept each other fed. He explained all of this in the matter-of-fact way of someone who had accepted the shape of their life without particularly deciding to.

Yucca listened without commenting. She walked beside him and let him talk and did not offer anything that sounded like pity, which he seemed to appreciate.

He had given back the three gil immediately upon being asked, plus the jade toggle, which Yucca had pocketed on the grounds that they had technically paid for it.

"Why are you helping me?" He asked, somewhere between the market and the docks.

"I needed a job." She said.

He looked at her sideways with the sharp assessment of a child who had been lied to enough to recognize it. "That is not the only reason."

She looked down at him. "No." She agreed. "It is not."

She did not elaborate. He seemed to understand that this was the full answer.

The boat was small. Yucca looked at it for a long moment when they arrived at the dock.

"This is very small." She said.

"It is the boat available." Lev said.

"It is the size of a large bathtub."

"You enjoy bathtubs."

She stepped into it with the careful energy of someone making a decision they had already committed to and were refusing to revisit. The boat rocked. She sat down immediately and placed both hands flat on the sides and looked at the horizon with focused composure.

Kotaro climbed in after her with the easy confidence of a child who had grown up near water. She noted this and said nothing.

Lev took up approximately a third of the available boat by himself. The whole vessel sat noticeably lower in the water once he was aboard.

"This is fine." Yucca said, to no one in particular.

They rowed out past the point where the water changed color, deep green fading to something darker, and dropped anchor in the area the merchant had indicated. Lev produced a fishing rod from somewhere, a simple thing with a hook and a piece of raw fish for bait, and cast it over the side with the unconcerned air of a man who had been asked to fish for a sea monster and had decided to approach this as he would any other fishing.

Yucca watched him do this. "That is your plan."

"You have a better one?"

"I thought you were going to shoot it."

"I will shoot it when it appears. First I need to attract it." He settled the rod against the side of the boat and looked at her. "Giant squid are attracted to movement and disturbance at the surface."

She looked at the water. The water looked back.

"I could.." She said, very carefully. "Put a foot in."

"You do not like the ocean."

"I am aware of that. I am making a contribution." She took off one sandal, held the side of the boat with both hands, and lowered her foot over the edge until her toes broke the surface. The water was cold and the boat rocked and she tightened both hands on the wood and said nothing about either of these things.

It was at this point that something moved under the stern.

"Was that-" She started.

"Yes." Lev said, hand already on his gun.

"Something is touching my foot."

"Take your foot out."

"I cannot take my foot out, what if it follows the foot."

"It will follow the foot regardless, take your foot out."

She took her foot out. Kotaro, from underneath the bow where he had apparently been hiding since they left the dock, chose this moment to make himself known by grabbing her leg and saying "What was that."

Yucca made a sound that she would be describing, later, as a tactically appropriate exclamation of surprise. She grabbed Kotaro by the back of his collar and looked down at him. He looked up at her with the wide-eyed expression of someone who had perhaps misjudged his hiding spot.

"Why-" She said, with extraordinary patience "...are you on this boat."

"I wanted to come." He said. "I want to be like you when I grow up."

There was a silence.

"You want to be on a very small boat in the dark waiting for a sea monster to eat you?" Yucca said.

"You are not scared." He said, with complete conviction.

She looked at Lev. Lev looked at her with an expression she could not entirely read in the low light, something warm in it that she was going to think about later when she was not sitting in a rocking boat with a sea monster directly below her.

"I am a little scared." She told Kotaro, honestly. "I just do not let it stop me."

Kotaro considered this with the serious thoroughness of someone filing it away.

Then the squid hit the boat from below.

The entire vessel lifted two handspans out of the water and came back down sideways and Yucca grabbed Kotaro with one arm and the mast with the other and held on. Something enormous surfaced alongside them, an arm thicker than her torso breaking the water and slapping down across the bow with a sound like a cannon shot, water cascading over all three of them. She had one impression of something vast and pale and deeply unreasonable before Lev's gun went off beside her ear.

Then it went off again.

And again.

She was crouched in the bottom of the boat with Kotaro tucked against her side, both of them soaked, the boat rocking violently with each shot, Lev standing in the stern with his feet spread and his expression one of focused professional attention as he reloaded with the calm efficiency of someone who had shot at alarming things before and found this one no more alarming than average. Another arm came over the side of the boat and he shot it at close range and it withdrew. The water around them had gone dark with ink. The boat was spinning.

"Le-" She said, from the bottom of the boat.

"Working on it." He said.

"LEV!"

"Nearly."

"LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEV! AAAAAAAAAAAAH-"

The squid surfaced fully for one enormous moment, the eye she had been told about breaking the surface directly beside them, pale and enormous and looking at them with the specific quality of something that had made a decision, and Lev shot it twice in rapid succession and it went under and did not come back up.

The water stilled.

The boat rocked.

Yucca and Kotaro sat in two inches of water at the bottom of the vessel and breathed.

"I got ink in my ear." She said, eventually.

"Me too." Said Kotaro.

Lev sat back down in the stern and looked at them both and said nothing, but something in his face was doing something she chose not to examine too closely while she was still soaking wet and covered in cephalopod byproducts.

Hirotsugu paid without complaint, which she took as a sign that the squid had genuinely been a serious problem. She negotiated the bonus on the grounds that the boat required cleaning and she deserved compensation for the ear situation.

After he was gone she stood with Kotaro at the dock and looked at the amount in her hand and then at him.

"Do you know the Inn near the east gate?" She asked.

He nodded.

"Go there and tell them Yucca Al'sahra sent you." She folded a specific portion of the gil and put it in his hand. "That will cover a meal a day for a year for you and whoever you bring. The innkeeper has been paid." She closed his fingers around it. "Do not lose it before you get there."

He looked at the gil in his hand and then up at her. His expression was doing something that she was not going to look at directly because she was already regretting how soft the last twenty-four hours had made her and she had a reputation to consider.

"Go." She said.

He went. He looked back once from the end of the dock, and she did not wave, but she watched him until he turned the corner.

She stood at the dock with Lev and listened to the water for a moment.

"If I still had a debt with you..." She said, without turning, "I would be in real trouble right now."

"You still have a debt with me." He said.

She turned to look at him. "That is not what you were saying earlier. Specifically, it is not what you were saying when you were..." she made a gesture that encompassed the recent past in general. "...finishing inside me."

"I said a great many things." He said, with equanimity. "The debt remains."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she turned back toward the market.

"Then I suppose-" She said. "That you are stuck with me for a while longer."

She walked.

He fell into step beside her.

Kugane moved around them, bright and indifferent and full of things they did not know yet, and the morning was still young.