The gloomy clouds, half broken and gathering, hung heavily over the city. Another rainstorm neared, the fifth one that week. The cobbled boardwalk still glistened from sunlight or flickering fires from the one prior. A hammer banging steel and a bellow breathing fire rolled by as I meandered. Men hauled crates and barrels, stifling grunts into ‘hmmpfhs’ as they set them down. A halberdier kept them moving. My off-hour saved my back from the same fate.

  A warm gale, potent enough to sour my tongue with salt, blew in from the southern ocean. It drowned out the soft padding of feet or the harsh ccking of two passing equestrians. The red plumes of their helmets shot towards the sky before getting pulled down by their own heft, nearly grazing their saddles. They shook and bobbed up and down with each step or breeze.

  Unlike the summer and autumn months, the walkway was practically deserted. Men were always reeling in the sea’s bounty or squabbling over prices, yelling over the shore’s waves. Only those who lived on the boardwalk, were chained to the boardwalk, or worked (and had the end of their off-hour quickly approaching) on the boardwalk stayed. The water swelled up over the quay, pping at the high seawall of the path. The turquoise water had long since been drowned.

  Regretfully, the captain came into view past a bend, my feet stilling their motion. The captain meant work. Yet, he was with another. The captain’s clothes once appeared fancy. They were a white, long-sleeved robe falling down to his knees with a yellow, colred undergarment. Visible on his calves were green tights. A box cap adorned his head, a silver feather glossy like polished floors, reflecting the light with a silver ring on each ring finger. He might as well have taken them off and called himself a beggar against who he stood by.

  The lordly man beside him wore furs from the far north he did not hunt. He wore silk from foreign shores he did not weave. He wore golden rings and jewels from deep mountains he did not mine. Those furs were connected to the hem of a cape, that cape which he did not sew. Over his chest, on his cape, he wore a seal of a phoenix he did embroider. A belt of leather that he did not process held up a sword he never wrought. In one hand, he held a cane of wood he did not chop and the other a chain of iron he did not smelt and smith. That chain connected around the neck of a Foltian, a sve he never captured with his own hands.

  The captain touched the lord’s shoulder, his voice quick and light. “Ah, Valerio, this is that beast whisperer I was telling you of.” His other hand gestured towards me, his fingers suddenly digging in hard when I neared. He jerked me until my feet stood right in front of the rge man. His tone deepened, like a parent commanding a child at a party of people he didn’t know. “Won’t you introduce yourself?” His eyes looked up at the lord twice, his head barely moving with it, a motion unseeable by the man.

  “Cortico, my lord.” I was staring down at the ground, my bow respectful. One like Valerio needed no more introduction.

  “Hold this, Eitecus.” Valerio passed over his cane, Captain Eitecus pcing both hands on the polished wood. With his right freed up, he held out his hand. My own found his, callouses scraping against callouses as we shook. “I am Valerio Fulgetis, Baron of Albganto.” Releasing me, he took back his cane. I scrambled, my hands shooting out and my back bending when the baron threw me the ‘reins.’ His mouth went to ear to ear, grinning at the sight. “She’s all yours.”

  “Wha…” My mind ran over the implications, gears turning like that of a windmill. “What’s the meaning of this?” The Foltian moved to my side, her beak facing the ground. Her eyes hardly slid open to see where she was going. Sullen blue feathers slid down her back, fring into a whitish-gray at her underside and the ends of her wings. Most of those rge grays from her wings were missing.

  Eitecus approached my left slowly, his hand finding my shoulder this time. It hardly pushed in, practically hovering over. Yet it jittered, his face barely able to stop smiling. The sunlight vanished to orange torchlight as the clouds condensed. “You see, Cortico, we’re being hired to go on an adventure of sorts.”

  That expression… I turned to Valerio, one brow-raised and asking him, “How much was promised?”

  “Surely that is unimportant,” Eitecus protested, my brow only going higher.

  Valerio raised up his free hand, putting to rest all questions. “Two trunks filled to the brim with gold and silver, and another to be given immediately. Not including the provisions I’ve stocked either. Take it as a token of goodwill.”

  Eitecus went to my right, his hand moving shoulders. In tune, the Foltian switched over to my other side to get out of his way. He looked out at the sea, the shore still rhythmically beating against the cobbled stone, occasionally whistling gales breaking the noise. “Have you ever wanted to see a phoenix?”

  “When I was younger,” I shrugged at the topic, recalling a bit of memories from that time. “Magnificent. Spiritual. Personally created by Mizdkas.” Those words were preaching to the choir. If it was new information, were they really Ensisilian? “Although as I aged, I realized that seeing one might be the st thing I see.”

  “We have sixty members of the ship. One twentieth of each trunk to one man.” We met gazes, one of his eyebrows now raised. “Besides the glory, I’m sure that should be enough to get any man to find one despite the danger.”

  “So we’re finding a phoenix,” I answered, my tone less dismissive than I intended. “Do we have a lead? One twentieth of a trunk IS a lot, but puking up my lungs on a month long voyage isn’t my intention either.”

  Valerio pointed at the Foltian. “She,” He began, getting a foot closer to me, “Knows. She’s a first generation sve, plucked right from the south shores. I’ve heard her share legends of her nd with her young. She was secretive,” A grin split his face, “But not secretive enough.”

  It all started to fall into pce then. The need for a beast whisperer. A Foltian and phoenix. The adventure. Eitecus made his way to the railing, staring over the boardwalk and into the seas. A few seagulls started to call in the distance, their scraws hardly reaching the city. “You, my good man,” Eitecus started, knuckles rasping against the wooden fence, “Are going to be our guide when we shore up.”

  The Foltian mumbled something to herself, the feathers of her neck moving almost imperceptibly despite the ck of wind in that moment. Valerio caught it, his eyes used to narrowing in on any sign of dissatisfaction from sves. “Uncadia, girl? You have anything to say about this?”

  The Foltian shook her head no, nothing more than a subtle twist of her head in either direction. Valerio’s cane knocked against the stones once before it tapped against the underside of her head. “Come on, you seemed to have something to say just a few seconds ago.”

  “You’ll never be able to make it there…” Her beak stayed trained on the ground, but her eyes fshed up to look at him for a single moment. The feathers on the back of her neck started to rise a bit, but they fought against themselves. Instinct and gut feelings warred against her mind desperately suppressing the reaction.

  “I think you doubt the ingenuity of man, dear girl!” He ughed, his hands coming to his full sides. The Foltian’s, or Uncadia’s, eyes joined her beak in gring at the glossy cobbles. The clouds continued to thicken. The light fog grew closer, becoming deeper and darker as it condensed around us.

  One thing still did not quite sit right with me. “How do we know she won’t lead us into a trap, or run away?”

  “This bird is a new mother. If she wants to be back to imprint on them, then she’ll return. If she doesn’t want any ‘unfortunate incidents’ to occur, she’ll be back with them. Isn’t that right?”

  “Don’t you dare hurt them.” Her body won out, her feathers rising up in defiance.

  “You don’t have to go,” Valerio responded, but he changed the grip on his cane and his smile vanished. He held it from the middle, looking more like a club than a walking implement. “However, you’ll be the one to take their shings.”

  “No one’s going to be shing anyone,” I jumped in, holding my hands out as I went in front of Uncadia. Almost immediately she pressed close to my back, her talons digging into my clothes tighter than what was comfortable.

  Valerio’s mouth started to slowly curl upwards again at the sight. Instead of clubbing me (which he knew full I was a subject under the king, not him) he tapped the top of his cane against my chest. I could feel it knocking against my sternum. “You. I like you. I knew Eitecus wasn’t lying when he said he had a whisperer on his hands. You bring a good name to Ergelna.”

  With a final pat on my shoulder, he parted with Eitecus and made his way through the fog, those fallen clouds consuming him. Behind me, Uncadia slowly stood up until her soft feathers tickled the back of my neck. Her breathy voice was more to herself than to me. “I haven’t even got to nurse my young yet.”

  “I’m sure there will be plenty of time to do that, plenty of time…” I trailed off as I stared at Valerio’s receding figure, his footsteps retreating until he rounded a final bend. The world settled into the rhythmic pping of the sea against the stones, quickly broken as Eitecus rapped his knuckles against the wood.

  “We leave early in the morning.”

  “But what about the stormy weather?”

  His gaze stayed fixed on the foggy seas, lightning splitting through the darkness for a moment. Then came the boom of far-off thunder, rolling through the nds like an ocean wave. Turning, his feet scuffling against the smooth stone below, he met my eyes. “We’ve gone through worse for less.”