Arc III: The Ancient Baby
Chapter 3: The Island of Very Small Very Old Very Terrifying People
First: England.
Actual England, this time. Jesper navigated them there with the focused precision of a man who had recalibrated thoroughly and was not going to have another cat island situation on his conscience. He spent three days at the rudder barely sleeping, checking stars, checking swells, checking the color of the water and the direction of birds and every other navigational indicator he had ever been taught, and on the morning of the fourth day he pointed at the coastline appearing through the mist and said, with quiet certainty: "England."
"You're sure," Sam said.
"I'm sure."
"No cats?"
"No cats."
"You said you were fairly confident last time."
"I'm fully confident this time."
"What's the difference."
"Thirty percent."
Sam decided this was acceptable.
It was England. Definitely England. The cliffs were right, the color of the stone was right, the smell of the coast was right, and when they landed and encountered the first actual English people, Tijjani confirmed the language with the relief of a man touching solid ground after a long swim.
The raid went, by any reasonable measure, extremely well.
This should have worried them. It did not worry them. They were too busy enjoying it.
I. The Raid, Briefly
The monastery was two miles from the coast, which was close enough for a rapid strike and far enough from any lord's hall that the response time was slow. It had gold — Jens had been right about that, he was generally right about monasteries having gold, it was one of his reliable instincts. It had silver plate, candlesticks, illuminated manuscripts that Sam immediately assessed as tradeable luxury goods and wrapped carefully in oilcloth, grain stores, preserved meat, excellent wine that had been a donation from a Frankish merchant and was significantly better than anything the crew had consumed in a month.
The monks ran. This was sensible. Jens gave them time to run, because raiding was business and dead monks were bad business and also Sven would not stop looking at him with that expression until he allowed the monks to evacuate, so the monks ran, and the crew took the gold, and Tijjani organized the extraction with the efficient calm of a man who had planned this in his head since the valley at the previous battle.
Combat was minimal but present. Six household warriors had been left behind to guard the place. They were competent men. They presented a brief and genuine obstacle.
And then Jesper dealt with them.
This is the part that matters.
They came from the left — three of the six, fast, organized, going for Jens while he was loaded with gold because that was the smart move. Jens dropped the gold, reached for his axe, turned—
And Jesper was already there.
He moved like he had in the English valley. Not like someone fighting. Like someone correcting a mistake that reality had made. The curved sword came out and two of the three were disarmed before they understood what had happened and the third stumbled back from a strike that had been, objectively, beautiful — the precise economy of someone trained from childhood by people who took it seriously.
The sword came up. The three household warriors were down, not dead, just very suddenly aware that continuing was a poor choice.
Jens stared.
Jesper turned around.
Saw Jens staring.
The sword went away. Immediately. Jesper looked at his nails. Specifically he looked at his nails with the focused attention of a man who had just remembered that he had nails and found them extremely interesting and had definitely not just done something impressive.
"What," Jesper said, examining a cuticle.
"You just—"
"What."
"Those three men—"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Jesper, I watched you—"
"The light here is very strange, I wouldn't trust your perception."
Jens stared at him for five full seconds.
Jesper continued examining his nails.
"You're insane," Jens said.
"Mm."
"You're actually insane."
"The gold's going to rust if you leave it on the ground."
Jens picked up the gold. He looked at Jesper one more time, with an expression that had too many things in it for him to sort through while holding a gold candlestick in a recently raided monastery, and went back to the ship.
Jesper watched him go.
He looked down at the sword in his hand.
He put it away.
He smiled, briefly, at nothing.
Then he went to help Sven carry grain sacks because apparently that was the kind of person he was becoming and he resented it.
II. The Departure Southward
They sailed from England in high spirits, which was a novel condition for the Bubbly Viking Crew and which everyone handled with slight suspicion, because things going well was historically the precursor to things going very wrong.
"South," Jens said, at the stern, studying the map, which was a better map now because Sam had purchased several in England from a cartographer who lived near the monastery and who, upon discovering that the Vikings didn't intend to burn his workshop, had become suddenly very commercially minded. "France next."
"Frankia," Tijjani said.
"Frankia. Plenty of monasteries."
"Plenty of Frankish lords who will object vigorously."
"That's fine."
"The Carolingian military response time is significantly faster than English—"
"Tijjani."
"Yes."
"It's fine."
Tijjani looked at the map and did not say what he was thinking, which was that the Carolingian military response time was absolutely not fine and would require significant planning, because Jens had the expression of a man who had successfully raided something and was now in the elevated emotional state that followed, and this was not the moment for caveats. The moment for caveats was later, when the elevation had settled.
They sailed south.
The weather was good. The sea was good. Sam's mood was good because the gold was good. Milos had been put in charge of steering for two hours as an experiment and had actually done a competent job because, it turned out, steering a ship required the same relationship with instinct and physical feedback as combat, and Milos was excellent at instinct and physical feedback, and he had genuinely enjoyed it, which was the most peaceful version of Milos the ship had yet witnessed.
Sven was cooking something with the dried herbs from the monastery stores and the smell was extraordinary and everyone was in a good mood.
Even Jesper was in a good mood, which expressed itself as only slightly irritating instead of extremely irritating. He sat at the prow and sang, actually sang, a Svealand sea song with a melody that was unexpectedly good because of course Jesper was also musically talented and of course he was casual about it, and Sven harmonized from the back of the ship because Sven harmonized with everything, and for a while the Bubbly moved south with music and good weather and the collective sense of a crew that was, improbably, beginning to feel like a crew.
Yuki stood at the prow beside Jesper and listened and watched the water.
Below, in the dark of the storage hold, three small cats ate scraps they had collected from the galley during the night and were entirely satisfied with their situation.
Yuki knew they were there.
He had started leaving scraps near the hatch in the evenings.
He told himself this was not encouragement.
It was encouragement.
III. Not France
They saw land on the third day south and west of England.
The coastline was green and low and pleasant. Morning light. Calm seas. The smell of woodsmoke and, interestingly, bread.
"France," Jens said.
Jesper was at the rudder. He looked at the coastline. He looked at the stars, which were not quite where they should be for France. He looked at the water color, which was not quite right. He looked at the shape of the hills on the horizon, which were also not quite right.
He opened his mouth.
He thought about the cat island.
He looked at the coastline again.
"...probably," he said.
"Probably," Sam said.
"I'm navigating under difficult conditions—"
"You said that last time."
"The conditions are still difficult."
"Jesper."
"There were clouds."
"JESPER."
"Let's just land and check," Jesper said reasonably.
They landed.
The first thing Jens noticed was the scale of things.
Specifically: everything was slightly small. The dock was a proper dock, well-built, good wood, but the proportions were — not wrong, exactly, but compressed. The boats tied to it were real boats but sized for people who were perhaps four feet tall. The buildings visible up the slope from the beach were real buildings with real roofs but with doors that Jens would have to crouch significantly to enter and windows at a height that would be comfortable for someone who came up to his chest.
"The architecture is small," Jens said.
"Yes," said Jesper.
"Is France small?"
"France is not small."
"Then—"
And then they saw the residents.
IV. The Population
They were adorable.
There was no other word. Jens's vocabulary did not have the word adorable in it but his face made the expression anyway.
They were tiny. Every single one. None of them taller than four feet, most shorter. Round faces. Enormous eyes. Voices that were high and clear, the voices of very small children. They came down from the village toward the dock with the curious, unafraid energy of people who either had no experience of threat or had moved so thoroughly past fear that they had come out the other side into something that looked like serenity.
They were wearing real clothes. Well-made clothes. They carried themselves with the specific dignity of people who were used to being taken seriously.
They were, in terms of physical presentation, very small and very round and very sweet.
Milos made a sound. "...oh."
"Milos," Jens said.
"They're tiny."
"I see that."
"Jens they're so tiny."
"Yes—"
"I could hold one in my hand."
"Don't hold them in your hand."
"Just one—"
"MILOS."
Sven was already on the dock, crouching down to be less enormous, which still left him looking like a very friendly hill in a man-shaped arrangement. He had put both hands behind his back in the universal gesture of I mean no harm and was smiling the smile that he used for animals and small children and people who were frightened, the smile that worked because it was completely genuine.
Two of the tiny people approached him. Looked up at him. Said something.
Sven said: "I don't understand but hello."
They said something else and grabbed his hand and started pulling him toward the village and Sven went, because Sven always went when small things grabbed his hand.
"Sven—" Jens started.
"I'll be fine!" Sven called back, already being escorted enthusiastically up the slope, Bjarni trotting behind.
Sam was doing his assessment, which took about thirty seconds before the math stopped making sense. "They're all—"
"Small," Tijjani confirmed.
"Not just small. They're—" Sam watched a group of the tiny people moving about the dock, doing dock things, handling ropes, inspecting the Bubbly with professional curiosity. "They move like adults."
"They move like very competent adults," Tijjani said, watching.
"But they look like—"
"Children. Yes."
They looked at each other.
"That's strange," Sam said.
"Very."
"Should we be worried?"
"Probably."
They were not yet worried. They would be worried later. For now there were approximately forty tiny people surrounding the crew with the warm, organized welcome of a community that had done this before, guiding them up the slope toward the village, speaking in the high clear voices that sounded like children and moved like running water, and the sun was out, and the village smelled of bread and something roasting, and it was very difficult to be worried when everything was this small and this pleasant.
"This is fine," Jens decided.
"This is definitely not fine," Jesper said.
"It's fine."
"Jens—"
"Look how small they are."
"That's EXACTLY WHAT I'M LOOKING AT."
Jens was already following the tiny people up the slope.
Jesper stood on the dock and breathed in and breathed out.
A tiny person approached him. Round face. Enormous solemn eyes. Reached up and grabbed his hand with both of theirs, which together were approximately the size of one of Jesper's.
Jesper looked down at it.
The tiny person said something in the local language, which Jesper's ear started working on immediately. It included a word that sounded very like the Norse word for beautiful and ended with what was possibly a diminutive form of princess.
"I'm a prince," Jesper said, to the tiny person.
The tiny person looked at him very carefully.
"Princess," the tiny person said, firmly.
"...fine," said Jesper.
He was led up the slope holding a tiny hand, and something in his chest did something he was not going to examine.
V. The Defeat of Sam, Sven, and Jesper
What happened in the village over the next several hours would later be described by Tijjani, who remained functional, as "the systematic emotional dismantling of three grown warriors by people who came up to their knees."
Sven went first, which surprised nobody.
He was installed in the village square, sitting on the ground because there was no chair in the village that accommodated him, and within twenty minutes he had six tiny people in his lap and four on his shoulders and one sitting on his head who appeared to be braiding sections of his hair, and Sven's face was the face of a man who had arrived at the exact place he was always going and found it even better than imagined.
"This is wonderful," Sven said, quietly, to nobody.
"You're defeated," Tijjani told him.
"Yes," Sven agreed, without distress.
Sam lasted longer. He was suspicious. He asked questions. He conducted his assessment. He watched the tiny people with the focused economic attention of a man looking for the angle.
Then a tiny person brought him food.
The food was excellent. Better than excellent. Roasted something with herbs, and bread, and a sauce that Sam could not identify and that was possibly the best thing he had eaten in his adult life.
He ate it.
A second tiny person brought him more.
He ate that.
A third arrived with what appeared to be a very small cup of wine, which was so small that Sam had to hold it with two fingers, and which was also excellent.
Sam sat back.
He looked at the sky.
He thought about profit margins and then thought about the sauce.
He thought about the sauce for quite a long time.
"This is," he said, "a good island."
"You're defeated," Tijjani said.
"I'm not defeated."
"You're smiling."
"I smile."
"Not like that."
Sam looked down. A tiny person had, during the wine moment, settled against his side and gone to sleep.
Sam looked at it.
He looked at Tijjani.
"I'm still conducting an assessment," Sam said quietly, so as not to wake it.
"Of course you are."
"This is professional."
"Completely."
Jesper was the most unexpected, which was why it hit the hardest.
He was surrounded. That was the first stage — tiny people coming from every direction, drawn to him with the specific magnetism that beautiful things had for small creatures, and Jesper's instinct was to be politely distant and slightly sharp and keep them at arm's length.
But they were very small.
And they were calling him Princess Jesper.
And one of them, a particularly round-faced one with enormous brown eyes, reached up both arms in the universal signal of pick me up and looked at him with the expression of someone who was entirely certain this was happening.
Jesper looked at the arms.
He looked at the face.
He said: "Oh, absolutely not."
The arms stayed up.
The face stayed certain.
"No," Jesper said.
The face did not change.
"I don't—" Jesper started.
He picked up the tiny person.
He put it on his hip, because this was the natural position, and his arm came up automatically to support it, and the tiny person grabbed a section of his hair in one hand and pointed at something across the village with the other, apparently giving directions.
Jesper followed the directions.
At some point in the next hour he acquired a second tiny person on the other hip and a third holding his hand and he was carrying them around the village being shown things — a garden, a well, a cat (one of the stowaways had apparently already made friends), a particularly interesting stone — and he was making the sounds a person makes when small things show them things, the mm and the oh, yes and the what is that, tell me, and his face was doing something it almost never did.
It was soft.
Not the performance of softness. Not the deliberate warmth he deployed when he needed people to lower their guard. Actual softness, the kind that happened when nobody was looking, the kind that came from somewhere under the arrogance and the sharpness and the careful, constant management of what people saw.
Jens came around the corner of a building.
Stopped.
Jesper was standing in the afternoon light with a tiny person on each hip and one at his hand, listening to whatever they were saying, his head slightly tilted, his expression—
Jens walked into a fence post.
Not a wall. A fence post. A single wooden post that was directly in front of him that he had simply failed to process because he was looking at something else.
It hit him in the shoulder. He stumbled. He caught himself. He looked at the fence post.
He looked back at Jesper.
Jesper had not noticed. He was still listening to the tiny person on his right hip, who was apparently in the middle of a very important story.
Jens stood very still for a moment.
"You hit a post," said Milos, who had appeared from nowhere and was eating something.
"I know."
"It's right there."
"I know."
"Are you okay."
"Fine."
"You're staring at Jesper."
"I'm looking at the architecture."
Milos looked at the architecture, which was small buildings. Looked at Jesper. Looked at Jens.
"Sure," Milos said, and kept eating.
Jens walked away in the other direction and had a conversation with himself that was brief and unpleasant and concluded with him telling himself firmly that he had been hit on the head during the English raid and was still recovering and none of his perceptions were reliable and he should focus on the mission.
The mission being: France.
Which this was not.
Which he should probably look into.
VI. The Elder Council
They met the elders on the second morning.
The meeting was called by the village, which meant it wasn't optional, which meant that Jens's instinct to simply collect his crew and leave was pre-empted by the polite but immovable arrival of an escort of twelve tiny people who communicated, with firm warmth, that the crew was invited to the council hall and this was not the kind of invitation you declined.
The council hall was a long building with a low ceiling — low for the Bubbly Crew, not for anyone else — and a fire in the center and a curved arrangement of seats at one end. In the seats sat seven people.
Seven very tiny people.
Seven extremely old very tiny people.
Not old the way people looked old at fifty or sixty, the creases and the grey hair and the slowing. Old the way very old trees were old, dense and deeply grained and giving the impression of having compressed a great deal of time into something that was still fundamentally hard. Their faces were a geography of wrinkles. Their eyes, all fourteen of them, were clear and bright and extremely awake.
The crew stood before them, all seven, in a row, and the net height difference was significant. Jens, at the center, looked down at the council across a distance that was almost comical.
The eldest of the seven, a woman so ancient that the term ancient needed a word after it, looked up at Jens.
"Sit," she said. In Norse. Accented but unmistakable.
Everyone sat, because when something that looked like a grandmother and felt like a cliff face told you to sit, you sat.
"You came from the north," the elder said. "Seven of you. One ship."
"Yes," Jens said.
"You raided a monastery in Northumbria nine days ago."
Silence.
"You arrived at a cat island before that."
More silence.
"Before that you left from Hedeby. Before Hedeby you were variously in Danir, Svealand, Frisia, and—" she looked at Yuki "—somewhere significantly further than any of those."
Yuki met her gaze. He inclined his head slightly.
She inclined hers.
"How," Tijjani said, with the focused attention of a man identifying a mystery, "do you know that."
The elder looked at him. "We are old," she said simply.
"That's not an answer."
"It is the answer."
Sam leaned forward slightly. "You have a network."
The elder looked at him. "We have been here for a long time. When you are in one place for a long time you hear things."
"From whom."
"From everyone who has been by. Ships. Birds. Merchants. The water itself, sometimes." She said this without drama, as though it were practical information. "We know who moves through these waters. We have known for a very long time."
"How long," Jens asked.
Another elder, a man with no hair and an expression of permanent mild amusement, said something in the local language.
"He says," Jesper translated — he'd been working on the language for two days and had the bones of it — "he was young when Charlemagne was young."
Beat.
"Charlemagne," Jens said.
"Yes."
"Charlemagne died forty years ago."
"Yes."
"And this man was young when Charlemagne was young."
"That's what he said."
Jens looked at the tiny hairless elder.
The tiny hairless elder looked at Jens with the mild amusement of someone who had heard every version of this reaction.
"How old are you," Jens said.
The tiny hairless elder said something.
"He says," Jesper said, "he's not sure exactly. Somewhere around a hundred and thirty."
The crew processed this.
"Right," said Jens.
"The youngest person on this island," Jesper continued, still translating from what the head elder was now saying, "is a hundred and two years old."
Everyone looked around the village, through the door and the windows. At the tiny round faces and the enormous eyes and the voices that rose and fell like children playing.
"They're not children," Sven said quietly.
"No," said Yuki, who had understood this on day one and had been waiting for everyone else to arrive.
"They're—"
"Very old," Yuki said. "Very, very old."
Sven looked at the tiny person who had braided his hair yesterday with the expression of a man revising a fundamental assumption.
"That's—" he started.
"Amazing," Yuki said.
"I was going to say unsettling."
"Also that."
VII. The Trap Reveals Itself
It was, in the end, very simple.
The head elder looked at the crew and said: "You are guests here and we welcome you. But you will not leave until we are satisfied."
"Satisfied of what," Jens said.
"That you are not a threat."
"We're Vikings," Jens said.
"Yes."
"We are specifically a threat."
"To some," the elder said. "Not to us."
"We could—"
"No," said the elder.
The doors of the council hall opened. Tiny people. Many of them, filling the back of the hall, standing with the organized patience of people who had planned this arrangement. Not with weapons. With presence, the specific presence of numbers and certainty.
"You will be our guests," the elder said, "until we are satisfied. Your ship is secure. Your belongings are safe. You will want for nothing." She looked at each of them in turn. "You will simply not leave."
"I can break the door," Milos said to Jens, quietly.
The elder looked at Milos.
"No," she said.
"I'm very strong—"
"The doors are not the containment," the elder said pleasantly. "You are free to try the doors."
Milos looked at the doors, which were normal doors. He looked at the elder. He looked at the doors again.
"...what is the containment," Milos asked.
The elder smiled. It was a very small smile on a very small very ancient face and it was the most alarming thing Jens had seen in recent memory.
"Information," she said.
VIII. The Interrogation Disguised as Hospitality
What followed was two days of the most sophisticated information extraction any of them had ever been subjected to, conducted entirely under the guise of peaceful hospitality.
They were fed extraordinarily well. Given comfortable spaces. Allowed to move through the village freely. The tiny ancient people engaged them in conversation — always friendly, always warm, always curious — and each member of the crew had a slightly different experience.
Jens was asked, by a rotating series of ancient tiny people, about his family, his homeland, his ships, his plans, his beliefs, his fighting style, what he considered honorable and what he considered shameful and what he wanted from the world. He answered honestly because he always did, and didn't realize until later that his answers had been more complete than he'd intended.
Tijjani encountered the only people he had ever met who were better at conversational redirection than he was. He tried twice to run his standard technique — the question that sounds like curiosity but is actually a probe, the casual reframe that shifts the terms of an exchange — and both times found it gently returned. He came back to Jens on the evening of the first day looking thoughtful.
"They're better than me," he said.
"What?"
"At this." He gestured to indicate the space between people where information lived. "At getting things from people without them noticing. They're better."
"How much better."
"I don't know what they got from me."
Sam's experience was the worst.
He sat across from a tiny elder named something he couldn't pronounce and tried to negotiate. He was a merchant. Negotiation was his superpower. He offered things: trade connections, information about sea routes, introductions to contacts in Frisia, knowledge of the price of amber and silver and silk in various northern markets.
The tiny elder listened.
And then, from apparent nowhere, produced information about Sam's own business that Sam was certain was not publicly known. Numbers. Specific numbers. Specific transactions. The legally creative ones.
"How," Sam said.
The tiny elder looked at him.
"How do you know that."
"We are old," the tiny elder said. This was apparently their answer to everything. It was, Sam was beginning to think, a genuinely complete answer.
"You're blackmailing me," Sam said.
"We are establishing the basis for honest conversation," the tiny elder said.
"That's what blackmail is."
"Then yes."
Sam stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then he answered every question he'd been asked honestly, because the alternative was worse and also because the sauce at dinner was very good and he wanted to stay on favorable terms with whoever made it.
Jesper was questioned by children.
Except they weren't children, which he knew, but they still looked and sounded like children, and the questions they asked were children's questions — where do you come from, what is it like, what is your favorite thing, do you have friends, are you happy — and Jesper answered them the way you answered children's questions, which was honestly, because children's questions didn't seem to require management.
He sat in a small garden in the late afternoon sun with three tiny ancient people and answered questions about Svealand and the sea and what it felt like to leave home and whether he missed it, and he said things he hadn't said to anyone on the ship, things he usually kept very far from the surface, and at the end of it he sat quietly and felt, strangely, lighter.
One of the tiny ancient people patted his hand.
"You're alright," she said, in accented Norse. "You'll be alright."
Jesper looked at her.
"You're a hundred years old," he said.
"And some," she agreed.
"And you're reassuring me."
"Someone should."
He didn't say anything. She kept her hand on his.
Jens saw this from across the garden and felt something very specific happen in his chest and walked into a different fence post. A different one. He did not tell anyone about this.
IX. The Outsmarting
On the morning of the third day the head elder called the crew back to the council hall.
"You may leave," she said.
"Just like that," Jens said.
"Just like that."
"What changed."
The elder looked at each of them. "We know what you are now. What each of you is." * A pause. "You're not a threat to this island."*
"How do you know."
"Because none of you are cruel," she said, as though this were obvious. "Foolish, some of you. Complicated, most of you. But not cruel. The cruel ones, we keep." She said this lightly, as though keep referred to a simple procedure that everyone understood.
Nobody asked what keep meant.
"You can go," she said. "Take your ship. Continue wherever you're going."
"South," Jens said. "Frankia."
"Hm," the elder said.
"Is that a warning."
"It's an observation." She stood, which brought her to approximately the height of Jens's belt buckle. "You should know something before you go."
"What."
"Your names are already traveling," she said. "You arrived on a cat island and left with a treaty. You raided in England and the reports say you were — unusual. Distinctive." She looked at the crew, all seven, the assembled disaster of them. "You are not yet famous. But the world is beginning to notice that you exist."
The crew looked at each other.
"Is that good," Sven asked.
"It depends entirely," the elder said, "on what you do next. Famous crews can become protected by their reputation. Or destroyed by it. It depends on what the reputation is."
"What's ours so far," Tijjani asked, genuinely wanting to know.
The elder thought about this. "Strange," she said. "People call you strange."
"Strange," Jens said.
"The crew that negotiated with cats. The crew with the golden prince who doesn't fight until he does. The crew with the man from the east. The crew with the giant who lets monks run." She paused. "Strange."
"I'll take strange," Milos said.
"Strange is fine," Sam said.
"Strange is fine," Tijjani agreed.
Yuki said nothing. He was looking at the elder with quiet attention, and the elder was looking back, and some information passed between them that didn't require words.
She inclined her head to him. He inclined his.
"Go," she said. "Sail south."
They went.
X. Departure
The tiny ancient people saw them off from the dock in the morning, a crowd of round faces and high voices and enormous eyes, waving, calling things in their language that Jesper translated as approximately safe waters and come back if you need to and one voice that was specifically calling goodbye Princess Jesper which Jesper heard and chose not to respond to audibly but which made something in his face do a complicated thing.
The one who had sat in the garden with him was there. He found her in the crowd without meaning to. She held up one small hand.
He raised his in return.
Bjarni, at the prow, barked once at the retreating dock, then turned and sat down and faced forward, which was his version of moving on.
The Bubbly turned south.
"Did that happen," Sven said, watching the island shrink.
"Yes," said Jens.
"They were all a hundred years old."
"Yes."
"But they looked like—"
"Yes."
Sven was quiet for a moment. "I let one sit on my shoulders and told him it was so he could see the view."
"Yes."
"He was a hundred and fifteen years old."
"He probably appreciated the view."
"Do you think he was offended."
"Sven."
"I didn't know—"
"He was delighted, Sven. He was laughing."
"Oh." Sven relaxed. "Good."
Sam was quiet, going through numbers on his wax tablet. He had, when they retrieved his silver from his room, found that it was all there. Every coin. Even the ones the tabby had taken on the cat island had somehow, inexplicably, been in the village, and had been returned.
He decided not to think too hard about the information network implications of that.
He looked at his numbers and thought about the sauce.
He would pay a significant amount for the recipe.
Milos was at the stern, looking back the way they'd come with an expression that Jens hadn't seen on him before. Not excitement, not the combat-hungry barely-contained energy. Something quieter.
"What," Jens said.
"Nothing," Milos said.
"You're making a face."
"No."
"Milos."
"The tiny old lady held my hand," Milos said. "When we were leaving. She just—" He made the gesture of someone taking a hand. "She looked up at me and she said something and I don't know what she said but it felt—" He stopped.
"What did it feel like," Jens said.
Milos looked at the water. "Like when my grandmother—" He stopped again. Then: "Never mind."
Jens clapped him on the shoulder, which staggered him slightly, because Jens miscalibrated the force of his gestures when he was feeling things.
"Sorry," Jens said.
"It's fine," Milos said.
They stood at the stern and watched the water for a while.
At the prow, Jesper sat with his back against the mast and his eyes closed and his face tipped up to the sun, and he thought about the garden and the small warm hand and you'll be alright, and he thought about a hundred and some years of small warm hands and clear eyes and knowing things.
He thought about what it would be like to be certain of something for that long.
He thought about what he was certain of.
The ship moved under him. The sail filled. Somewhere below deck, three small cats arranged themselves in a pile and purred, too quiet to be heard over the sea.
"Frankia," Jens said, from the stern.
"Frankia," Jesper confirmed, opening his eyes.
"Actually Frankia this time."
"I've recalibrated."
"You keep saying that."
"And each time I'm more calibrated than before."
Jens stared at him.
"That's how calibration works," Jesper said.
"I'm going to—"
"Good morning, Jens."
"It's afternoon."
"Good afternoon, Jens."
Jens went back to the stern.
Tijjani watched this exchange from amidships with the satisfaction of a man whose theory was being continuously proven.
Yuki, beside him, made a small sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one.
"You heard what the elder said," Tijjani said to him.
Yuki looked at him.
"About those two."
Yuki raised an eyebrow.
"She said something to you. At the end. When she looked at you."
Yuki was quiet for a moment. Then he said, carefully, in his limited Norse, which he deployed only when he judged it necessary: "She said: those two take long time."
"How long."
Yuki considered.
"She is hundred and thirty." He looked at Jens. Looked at Jesper. Looked back at Tijjani. "She say: she seen slower."
"How much slower."
"Not much."
Tijjani pressed his lips together very firmly.
"But she say: worth watching," Yuki added.
"Wonderful," Tijjani said.
"She say: funny."
"Incredible."
"She say: classic."
"I am going to lose my mind," Tijjani said. "I am surrounded by idiots and ancient babies and I am going to lose my mind."
Yuki patted him on the arm, once, sympathetically.
Then went back to watching the sea.
The Bubbly sailed south.
The world was beginning to know their name.