POV: john-west
Summary
John does not, it turns out, manage to drown himself in five feet of water — though it is a close thing until Ealstan hauls him out. He coughs on the beach as a HUD warning informs him his nanites have detected near-drowning, are feeding oxygen directly into his bloodstream, and can hold him for about five hours; would he like to contact emergency services, or activate first-aid mode to help others? He declines both and turns off the emergency prompt for the future. The remaining Hordamen, packing up, eye him without comment as the rescued captive is led inland.
A quarter-hour later they are back at the cliff above the beach, watching the two retreating ships dwindle. The third — the lead ship — has been abandoned, half-sunk, and is still impossibly burning where John drew the rune. He cannot stop staring at it. The local rules of physics, he keeps wanting to tell himself, are still the local rules of physics; water-based liquids do not catch fire from a clear sky. Maybe Sefawynn switched the ink. Maybe. The flame finally gutters out, and his confidence in *maybe* doesn't return with it.
Ealstan has built an ordinary fire for them up the bank. The rescued captive — olive-skinned, black-bearded, robed — turns out to speak with the first accent John has been able to place since he landed here: clearly something like Middle Eastern. He thanks Ealstan and Sefawynn with deep formality. His name is Yazad; he came to live among the Weswarans ten years ago and has committed to stay among them for the rest of his life. He is, as it slowly comes out, a Zoroastrian missionary.
John, sitting down at the fire with his confidence very badly shaken, lets the conversation go on around him. Yazad thanks him directly: *I have not seen wyrd stop an axe away from city protections, certainly not on the open sea.* John can't answer. Sefawynn quietly says John broke Woden's covenant — he wrote *werging* words — and saw Thunor burn the ship for it. Ealstan reads the same event as a warning, not a sentence; the aelv still lives, after all.
Yazad gently broadens it. The prohibition on writing isn't universal, he says — in his own lands, many people write freely. *Different lands,* Sefawynn answers. *Different gods.* *A different god,* Yazad says, and turns to Ealstan with practised warmth: *Ahura Mazda. A god above gods. A god who loves his people rather than punishing them.* He fields John's question about Christianity by clarifying — those are the Yeshuans, a cousin faith. Yeshua was rescued by Ahura Mazda from the Romans; the two faiths were briefly one people, a coalition of all the lands of Abraham, and then split again — all centuries before the Hunas destroyed Rome outright. John recognises the shape of the history and the shape of the gap from his own.
Yazad cheerfully offers to convert him — *I will try to convert anyone*, he winks; an aelv would be a particular accomplishment. Ealstan, more practically, asks how Yazad came to be in Hordaman hands; was the coast being raided? No — Yazad confesses that he had been out sailing alone on a small boat for the pure pleasure of it, having grown up in a country northeast of Persia that has no sea at all. The Hordamen scuttled his ship; everything else was his own fault. Ealstan finds the concept of sailing-for-its-own-sake genuinely incomprehensible, and Yazad, kindly, observes to John that it is hard to feel joy in such things when one lives under the eyes of gods who mourn.
John, listening, hears in Yazad's voice the same delight Jen used to bring to her history. He remembers wanting, for years, to feel about anything what she felt about her studies. That, he thinks, might be why he tried art school in the first place.
Ealstan, glancing at the sun, calls them back to the road. They've delayed enough. They can't enter Wellbury today — the kidnappers will have arrived first and any chance of surprise is gone — but with both Sefawynn and Ealstan visibly fading from a sleepless night, Yazad's offer of beds at the Preserve, three hours' ride north, is too useful to refuse. They accept. Yazad waves off the suggestion that he ride; his legs, he says, are jealous of the time he's been giving the sea.
As they stand, they find writing on the ground. Burning letters, freshly scorched, in front of John. Ealstan and Sefawynn look anywhere else. Yazad peers over John's shoulder and asks, curious, whether the script might be Greek. *English,* John says, stunned. *My language.* The letters read: *Nice work. You might be worth the trouble.* *Scrub it out,* Sefawynn hisses, and Ealstan mutters that this, too, is Logna's Fire. John drags his foot across the smouldering words.
They mount up. He checks that the rest of his handbook pages are dry and unsinged — they are — and only then puts together that the book *had* exploded when he came through, charring half its pages. He had been ignoring the obvious. He is, he admits to himself on the way to the Preserve, very close to believing in a pantheon of Norse gods with the letters swapped around.