The Long Way to Kugane

The morning came in through the window of room four the way mornings always did in port cities, loud, salt-smelled, and entirely too early for someone whose legs had only recently remembered how to function.

Lev's room was number three.

Yucca had counted the doors twice before going to sleep, just to be certain.

She was already dressed when the sun cleared the rooftops, ears flat against her head in the particular way that meant she was thinking rather than annoyed, fingers working the last of the gold chains back around her waist as she studied herself in the small and slightly warped mirror above the washbasin. She looked, she decided, entirely too functional for someone who had spent the previous evening the way she had. Her hair disagreed with this assessment. She addressed the situation with the focused hostility of a woman who had been winning arguments against her own reflection since childhood, and by the time she was finished she looked sharp enough to do business.

Which was precisely what she intended to do.

She had been awake for a while before she heard any movement from room three, and by the time boots were hitting the floor next door she was already downstairs.

The common room of the Inn smelled like woodsmoke and the specific kind of hope that only exists in places people pass through rather than stay. A handful of travelers ate in silence at the long table near the window. Behind the front desk, the innkeeper was doing his accounts with the focused expression of a man who did not trust numbers but had no choice but to work with them anyway.

He was Au Ra. Older, perhaps fifty, with the dark scales of a Raen along his jaw and the posture of someone who had worked hard to appear more important than his establishment suggested. His name, as Yucca had already learned from asking the girl who brought the breakfast rolls, was Tokoro Jihen. He had run the Inn for eleven years. He had one daughter. He had, from what Yucca could read in the particular way his eyes moved to the empty staircase every few minutes, something heavy on his mind.

Yucca set both room keys on the desk with a soft double click and smiled at him.

It was not her warmest smile. It was the one she used when she was about to be very reasonable and needed the other person to understand that this was a courtesy.

"Good morning." She said. "I wanted to discuss the matter of last night's rooms."

Tokoro Jihen looked at the keys. Then at her. Then at the keys again. "The rate was agreed upon at check-in."

"It was." Yucca agreed pleasantly. "And I intend to honor it. I simply thought we might explore whether there was a more creative arrangement that would benefit us both."

She tilted her head slightly, one ear angling toward him. "You have been looking at that staircase every four minutes since I sat down. That is not the look of a man worried about his accounts. That is the look of a man with a problem he does not know how to solve."

Tokoro Jihen said nothing.

Yucca waited. She was extraordinarily good at waiting.

"You are..." He said finally. "Some kind of body-guard?"

"Some kind." She confirmed. "My associate and I do escort work, among other things. We are reliable, we are discreet, and we are currently available." A pause. "And as I said, we have a small matter of last night's bill to settle."

The man was quiet for a long moment, fingers flat on the desk. Then he closed his ledger, and Yucca knew she had him.

His daughter's name was Seira.

Yucca learned this along with everything else in the span of about twenty minutes, which was how long it took Tokoro Jihen to explain the situation in the careful, measured way of a man who had rehearsed this speech for someone else and was now delivering it to a Viera he had met eleven minutes ago.

The arrangement was this. Seira was eighteen. She had been promised, through correspondence and mutual business interest, to a merchant family in Kugane. The Hirano family were respected traders with connections throughout the Far East, and the match was sensible, traditional, and good for everyone involved. The wedding was in six weeks. The girl needed to be there in four. A ship was leaving from the docks in two days, and Tokoro Jihen needed someone to make sure his daughter was on it and stayed on it until Kugane, where the Hirano family would take responsibility for her.

"She is... reluctant." He said, in the tone of a man describing a wildfire as a minor inconvenience.

"Reluctant." Yucca repeated.

"She does not fully appreciate the opportunity."

"I see." Yucca laced her fingers together on the desk. "And the compensation, beyond the rooms?"

The number he named was reasonable. The bonus he added when she did not immediately agree was better. By the time Lev came downstairs, rubbing sleep from his eyes and ducking through the doorframe with the specific energy of someone who had genuinely rested for the first time in a while, Yucca was already shaking Tokoro Jihen's hand.

She turned and looked up at Lev with the expression of someone delivering news they had already decided on.

"Good morning partner~" She said in a strangely cheerful way. "We have a job. We are also even on the rooms." A beat. "You are welcome."

He could question it, complain, but it wouldn't do any good. He snorted and asked if he could at least have breakfast before doing whatever it was.

Seira Jihen was not, as it turned out, in her room.

She was in the alley behind the Inn trying to convince a fisherman to let her buy passage on his boat to anywhere that was not here, a plan that might have worked if the fisherman had been less honest, or if Yucca had not simply walked around the building the moment Tokoro pointed at the ceiling and said she was upstairs.

The girl spun around when she heard footsteps, dark hair loose around her shoulders, scales catching the morning light along her cheeks and collarbones. She had her mother's coloring, probably, because she had nothing of her father's careful restraint. Her eyes went from Yucca to Lev and her jaw set immediately.

"No." She said.

"You do not know what I am going to say." Yucca said.

"You are going to tell me to come back inside."

"I was going to introduce myself first." Yucca stopped a reasonable distance away, hands loose at her sides. "I am Yucca. That is Lev. We are going to Kugane. Your father has asked us to travel with you."

"My father." Seira said, with a particular weight on those two words that Yucca filed away immediately. "Can ask whatever he likes. I am not going."

"Noted." Yucca said. "Are you hungry? They have good bread inside. We can be angry and eat at the same time, I do it constantly."

Seira stared at her.

Lev said nothing, which was, Yucca had come to understand, his most effective contribution to most situations.

"I am not going to Kugane." Seira said again, slower this time, as though volume and patience were the issue.

"I heard you the first time." Yucca said. "Come eat. We can talk about it or not talk about it. Either way, the fisherman is not taking you anywhere, he told your father you were here approximately three minutes ago."

Seira looked at the fisherman. The fisherman looked deeply apologetic and went back to his boat.

For a long moment the girl stood in the alley with the particular expression of someone recalculating their options and finding them limited. Then she walked past both of them back toward the Inn door, chin up, not looking at either of them.

Yucca glanced at Lev.

He looked back at her.

She made a small gesture that meant something like this is going to be an interesting two days and followed the girl inside.

She tried again the morning the ship departed.

In retrospect, Yucca had expected it. She had slept lightly and kept her door cracked, and when she heard the soft footstep in the hall at the hour before dawn she was already sitting up. She did not rush. She counted to ten, pulled on her boots, and walked downstairs at a pace that suggested a woman going for an early walk rather than one intercepting an escape.

She found Seira at the end of the dock, a bag over one shoulder, staring at a smaller vessel moored four slips down from the ship they were meant to board. She was watching something on the deck. Or someone.

Yucca stopped beside her and looked.

A young sailor was coiling rope near the bow of the smaller ship, Hyur, perhaps twenty, with the particular tan of someone who had spent most of their life under an open sky. He had not noticed them yet.

Yucca looked at Seira.

Seira was not looking at her.

"Ah." Yucca said quietly.

"Do not." Seira said.

"I was not going to say anything."

"You were absolutely going to say something."

Yucca was quiet for a moment. The water moved dark and slow beneath the dock. "Is he on our ship?"

Seira said nothing, which was its own answer.

"Then come on." Yucca said, not unkindly. "Before Lev has to come find us both and he spends the whole voyage smelling like early morning dock."

She did not grab the girl's arm. She simply turned and walked back toward their ship, and after a moment she heard footsteps behind her.

Small victories.

The ship was called the Sapphire Meridian, a mid-sized trading vessel with a crew of twenty-two and a captain who had clearly seen everything and was not interested in seeing anything new. Yucca liked her immediately.

Their cabin was small and smelled like salt and old wood and something that might have once been citrus. Seira sat on her bunk with her bag in her lap and said nothing for the first hour while the coast of La Noscea disappeared behind them. Yucca sat across from her and cleaned her knives, which was not a threat so much as a habit, though she had learned over the years that the distinction was not always obvious to other people.

Lev took up considerable space simply by existing.

It was Seira who spoke first, eventually, which was how Yucca had expected it to go. Silence was a pressure and the girl had been carrying too much of it for too long.

"He is not a bad man." She said, staring at her bag. "That is what everyone says. Everyone who meets him says he is not a bad man."

Yucca set down the knife she was working on. She did not say anything.

"He has the Inn." Seira continued. "He works hard. He is polite to his customers. He gives to the Adventurers' Guild charity box at the end of every month, I have seen him do it." A pause. "But I grew up in that Inn. I was born in Limsa Lominsa. I have never been to Doma. I have never been anywhere east of Mor Dhona. I do not know the language. I do not know the customs. I do not know this family he has sold me to." Her voice did not shake, which told Yucca more than shaking would have.

"I know the docks. I know the smell of salt and fish and engine smoke. I know what the fog looks like coming in from the sea at four in the morning. I know three different ways to get from the lower decks to the Aftcastle without paying the lift toll." A pause. "My mother died when I was born. He never forgave me for that. Not in words. But in everything else."

Yucca was very still.

"He hit you." She said. It was not a question.

Seira looked up at her for the first time since they had boarded.

"Not where anyone would see." She said.

The cabin was quiet for a moment. The ship creaked around them, the sea moving in long, slow swells beneath the hull.

Yucca picked up her knife again. Cleaned it slowly. Put it away.

She did not look at Lev, but she was aware of him across the small space, sitting with his arms on his knees, saying nothing, looking at the floor. There was something in the way he was not moving that she could read, though she could not have explained how.

"You do not have to tell me anything else." Yucca said finally. "Rest if you can. The crossing to Kugane takes time."

Seira lay down on the bunk facing the wall. She did not sleep for a long time. Yucca could tell by her breathing. But she stopped talking, and that was something.

Later, when the girl's breath had finally evened out, Yucca looked across at Lev in the dark.

She did not say anything.

Neither did he.

But something had shifted, quiet as a tide turning, in the shared silence between them.

His name was Aldric Fenn, and Yucca met him properly on the third day out when he brought them their morning provisions and tripped over the threshold of the cabin door, saving himself from a complete disaster only by some combination of sea-legs and reflexes that suggested he had been doing this for years.

He was twenty, as she had guessed from the dock. Hyur, brown-haired, with honest eyes and the kind of careful manners that come not from upbringing but from genuinely not wanting to cause anyone trouble.

He looked at Seira.

Seira looked at a point approximately four inches above his left shoulder with the focused intensity of someone detonating nothing.

"Miss Seira." He said, quietly, like the word was something he had been keeping in a careful place.

"Aldric." She said, to the empty air beside him.

Yucca looked between them with the expression of someone watching a play whose ending she had already worked out.

"Thank you." She said to the boy, taking the provisions. "What is your route after Kugane?"

He blinked, surprised to be addressed. "Back to Limsa, ma'am. This is my last crossing on the Meridian. Captain Sorrel is retiring the route."

"Mm." Said Yucca.

She closed the cabin door.

She turned around to find Seira staring at a fixed point on the ceiling with an expression of profound suffering.

"Say nothing." The girl said.

"I was not going to say anything." Yucca said, and meant it slightly less than the first time.

The pirates came on the fifth day.

They came out of the morning fog the way things come out of morning fog in stories, all at once and without the courtesy of warning, two ships running dark with their flags already gone and their intent entirely clear from the way they were moving to bracket the Meridian on both sides.

The alarm bell had barely finished ringing before Lev and Yucca was on deck.

Lev had been in enough of these situations to move through the first thirty seconds without thinking, which was fortunate because the first thirty seconds were when most people spent their time being surprised. Lev was not surprised. He was already measuring distances, counting figures on the approaching deck, identifying the two crossbow positions on the port side ship and the grappling hooks being readied on the starboard.

Yucca was beside him. This he noted and filed away as useful.

The Meridian's crew was not inexperienced but it was outmatched in numbers, and the fight that followed was the specific kind of chaos that feels eternal while it is happening and absurdly short in memory afterward. Yucca worked close and fast, which was her way, letting the bigger threats go past her toward Lev while she handled the ones that needed handling quietly. She took a cut along her left forearm that she did not notice until later. She also, at some point, ended up in the water.

This was not the plan.

The plan had involved staying on the ship, but a boarding plank had collapsed under the weight of four men simultaneously and Yucca had been standing on the wrong end of it. The water was cold in the way that removes opinions. She came up once, got a half breath, went back down when a wave from the hull hit her.

She came up the second time held up.

Aldric Fenn had gone in after her without apparently stopping to consider it as a decision, and he had considerably more experience with the water than she did. He got her back to the hull. Got a rope into her hands. Got himself and her both back onto the deck in a sequence of movements that suggested he had done something similar before, or was simply the kind of person who moved toward problems rather than away from them.

She sat on the deck coughing salt water and looked up at him.

He looked back, soaking wet, mildly alarmed, waiting to see if she was alright.

"Good." She said, when she had her voice back. "You are useful."

He blinked.

The fight was already ending around them, the pirates pulling back faster than expected, two of their number down and the Meridian's crew having defended with more ferocity than the attackers had apparently planned for. Lev had, from the state of the starboard railing, been involved in convincing them to reconsider.

Yucca sat on the wet deck and breathed and looked at Aldric Fenn and thought about a girl who had grown up knowing the docks and the fog and three ways to avoid the lift toll.

She thought about a man who kept the charity box topped up where people could see it.

She breathed.

Kugane rose out of the morning sea like something from an ink painting, all tiered rooftops and harbour lanterns still burning gold in the early light. Yucca stood at the bow and looked at it and felt, as she sometimes did in new cities, the specific feeling of possibility that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with what a place might contain that she did not yet know about.

Seira stood beside her.

She was not looking at the city. She was looking at Aldric, who was working the rigging above them, and her expression was the expression of someone who had made a decision and was not yet sure if they were brave enough to carry it out.

"He is going back to Limsa." Seira said.

"I know." Yucca said.

"He asked me once. Before my father arranged this." She paused. "He asked if I would travel with him. I said I could not."

"What would you say now?"

Seira was quiet.

Yucca looked at the city getting closer. She thought about contracts, about the number Tokoro Jihen had written on the paper she had folded and put inside her vest. She thought about a girl born in Limsa who had never been east of Mor Dhona. She thought about the specific sound of someone saying a name like it was something kept in a careful place.

She thought about a man who hit where no one would see.

"Lev..." She said, without looking at him.

He was there. He was always just there, which she had stopped finding surprising.

"I need to talk to you." She said. "Privately."

They had the conversation on the lower deck while Seira helped Aldric with the rigging above, because neither of them had told her to stop and neither of the sailors nearby had objected, possibly because Aldric's face had become approximately the same color as the dawn when she had offered.

Yucca made her case the way she made all her cases, without performance and without apology.

"The contract says deliver her to the Hirano family." she said. "It does not specify in what condition, or whether she arrives willingly, but I think we can agree that a girl delivered against her will to a family arranged by a man who used her as a punching bag for eighteen years is not something either of us wants on our record."

Lev said nothing, which meant he was listening.

"Aldric saved my life while you're busy..." She continued. "I dislike owing people. This would make us even." A pause. "Also, she is eighteen. She is an adult. She has the right to make her own choices, and her choice is that ship going back west." She looked at him directly. "I will handle the father."

"Handle how?" Lev said, in the tone of someone who had a reasonable idea and wanted it confirmed.

"I will write him a letter."

He looked at her.

"A very good letter." She said.

They let Seira go in the late afternoon.

She came to find Yucca in the small courtyard near the harbour where they had stopped to let Yucca change the bandage on her forearm, and she stood in front of her with her bag over her shoulder and her jaw set and her eyes very bright, and she did not say anything for a long moment.

"You are breaking your contract." She said finally.

"I am a terrible businesswoman." Yucca agreed. "It is a known flaw."

Seira looked at her. "Why?"

Yucca tied off the bandage and looked up. "Because you know three ways to get from the lower decks to the Aftcastle without paying the lift toll and that is too specific a skill to waste in a marriage you did not choose." She paused. "Also, he saved my life. I do not forget things like that. It would be rude."

Seira looked at Lev, who was watching the harbour with the expression of a man who had decided this was not his conversation to have.

Then she looked back at Yucca and did something Yucca had not quite expected, which was to step forward and wrap her arms around her, brief and fierce, before stepping back with her chin up and her eyes still very bright.

"Thank you." She said.

"Do not thank me." Yucca said, with some feeling. "Go. Before I change my mind or start doing math about the contract again."

Seira went.

Yucca watched her cross the harbour toward the Meridian and watched Aldric Fenn see her coming from the deck and watched his entire face do something that should probably have been private.

She looked away before it got worse.

"Not a word." She said to Lev.

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

The letter took her the better part of an hour, written at a table in a teahouse near the harbour that had been very patient about her ordering nothing but hot water while she worked. She went through three drafts before she had something she was satisfied with, and then she read it through twice more and added two sentences in the middle and removed one at the end.

The final version read as follows.

To Tokoro Jihen, Innkeeper, Limsa Lominsa

It is with great sorrow that I write to inform you of the catastrophic events that have befallen your daughter's crossing and nearly claimed the lives of all aboard the Sapphire Meridian.

What began as an uneventful passage turned, on the fifth day, to terror beyond description, when from the deep waters beneath our hull there rose a creature of such enormous and unnatural proportion that I lack the vocabulary in any language I command to fully convey its scale. I have seen leviathans. I have seen the wakes of things that should not exist. Nothing prepared me for what appeared off the port bow that morning, a mass of writhing darkness larger than the ship itself, with eyes like lanterns and a silence about it that was somehow worse than any sound could have been.

The beast struck the hull twice. The second strike split the stern.

In the chaos that followed I was thrown into the sea and would have perished were it not for the intervention of a passing vessel, which pulled me from the water half-drowned and entirely without my possessions, my associate, or, I grieve to tell you, any other survivor that I was able to account for.

Your daughter Seira, to her great credit, showed remarkable bravery in the moments before the ship went down. I had grown fond of her in our short time together. She spoke warmly of you.

My associate, Lev Yorvasch, a man of great courage and considerable size, was last seen attempting to hold a section of railing in place with his bare hands. I choose to remember him that way.

I have nothing left but the clothes on my back, a knife I did not remember putting in my boot, and the knowledge that I survived something that should not have survived me.

I will find my way eventually.

I always do.

With sincere condolences for your loss and great personal grief for my own,

Yucca Al'sahra

P.S. The creature was real. I am not available to answer follow-up questions about the creature.

She sealed it, addressed it, paid the harbour post to send it west, and sat for a moment with her hands flat on the table.

Then she picked up her knife and went to find Lev.

He was exactly where she had expected him to be, which was standing in the middle of the market street nearest the harbour reading a flyer that someone had pressed into his hand with the enthusiastic determination of someone whose job involved pressing flyers into hands.

She stopped beside him.

"Please tell me-" She said. "That is a bingo night."

He turned the flyer so she could see it.

It was not a bingo night.

The flyer was illustrated with what appeared to be stylized steam rising from a large decorative tub, surrounded by flowers she did not recognize and characters in a script she could not read, though the small text at the bottom had been helpfully translated into several languages including one she could.

SPA AND WELLNESS EVENING. ALL WELCOME. BRING YOUR OWN INTENTIONS.

She looked at it for a moment.

"No bingo." She said.

"No bingo." He confirmed.

She looked up at him. He was already looking at her with the expression he sometimes had that she had not entirely figured out yet, the one that was not quite a smirk and not quite something else.

"Fine." She said. "We go." She took the flyer from him and folded it into her vest. "But first, we need to address several practical realities." She started walking, and he fell into step beside her in the way that had stopped surprising her somewhere between Limsa and here.

"We are in Kugane. Our chocobo and the carriage are at an Inn near the docks back in La Noscea, which I am choosing not to think about right now. We have no active contract, the previous one having been, as of this afternoon, technically voided by a sea monster." She counted on her fingers as she walked. "I still owe you money, which means I am not free of you and you are not free of me, which is frankly inconvenient for both of us, and before I can pay you back I need gil, which means we need work." She glanced at him sideways.

"Kugane is not small. Someone here needs something done. They always do." She paused at a corner to look both ways, orienting herself with the particular efficiency of someone who always knew which direction was the harbour. "We find work. We get paid. I pay you back. We go our separate ways." A pause. "Probably." Another pause. "Eventually."

She turned right.

"The spa can wait until this evening." She said. "Right now I need food, information, and someone willing to pay us to do something they cannot or will not do themselves, in that order." She looked back at him once over her shoulder, ears tilting slightly in a direction she did not acknowledge.

"Keep up, Lev. By my count that letter just killed you for the third time, which means you are down to six lives." A beat. "You should be nicer to me. I am clearly the most dangerous thing in your vicinity and I have not even been trying."

She walked in silence for half a block before speaking again, eyes moving across the market stalls with the practiced scan of someone cataloguing everything without appearing to look at anything.

"I need to find a clothing stall before we do anything else." She said, glancing down at herself with mild displeasure. "I look like I just washed up from a shipwreck, which I did, but I would prefer not to advertise it. I want local cuts, local fabric, something that does not immediately announce that I have no idea where I am." Her ears tilted forward with something that was not quite enthusiasm but was close to it. "I refuse to walk around this city looking like a lost foreigner for the next however many days we are here. It is bad for business and worse for my dignity."

She stopped at the corner and looked out past the market rooftops toward where the light sat differently, the particular quality of brightness that meant open water nearby.

"And tomorrow-" She said, without looking at him, in the tone of someone raising a point they had been waiting to raise for some time. "You are taking me to the beach."

She turned to look at him fully, and there was nothing ambiguous about her expression this time. It was simply want, uncomplicated. "I have been hearing about the eastern seas my entire life and I have salt water in places I will not describe to you and I have still not stood on a proper beach. So tomorrow, before any work, before any contracts, before anything." She pointed at him once. "Beach. That is non-negotiable."

She walked into the market, the morning light catching the gold chains at her waist, and Kugane opened around them both like something that had been waiting.