Pieter trudged silently up the hill with his apprentice, listening to his tears and guilty, embarrassed attempts to make up for them. After some time, when they were away from the immediate chill of the ocean, and the campfire was only a hopeful promise, he started to speak. His voice was soft, and though it was conversational, it had weight.

"Ya know. When I first met the mermaids- and I was a little younger than you- my priest hadn't bothered to tie a rope to us. He just had us half dozen apprentices gather on the beach at night, and called them up. Two of us drowned that night, we were so enchanted by the mermaids they didn't realize that they had gone so deep into the water the riptide dragged them away. I nearly joined them, only my brother pulled on my hair so hard a patch of it came out and I stopped. They were beautiful, and they owned us. That's what mermaids do, they take sailors hearts, and they're loathe to give them back. They're not natural, not like beasts and men. They belong to something else, something older. I've heard talk that every star in the night sky is a sun like ours, with planets around them. And that the black between the stars is an ocean, and that creatures swim through them. Maybe mermaids swam from the night sky into the ocean here. Or they're just spirits, not as big as gods but just as hungry. They took two sailors that night, and they took four more of us over that next year. My priest wasn't a good man. He had lived through the Yepturn wars as a boy, and life was cheap to him. None of those sailors needed to have died. But he wanted to find priests, and he didn't care enough to save the ones who weren't ready. There are a lot of priests like that, folks who are more concerned about being strong than they are about saving the one's who aren't." 

He fell silent for a moment. Clouds drifted over the moon, plunging them into a darkness that seemed deeper than the night of a new moon. He continued, "I wasn't ready. Mermaids, it's their nature to know your weakness. They change the world around them to make you weak. My brother was as weak as me, but he had me to keep him strong. It's a challenge, becoming stronger than mermaids. But you can do it. Exposure and training makes you resistant to their charms."

They had neared the campfire now, and the clouds had moved on. After the darkness, it seemed like the flat around the camp was bathed in a silvery sunlight. 

"My brother, he left after a year. He apprenticed at a chandlery, and never went to the waters edge again. He had a good life."

Clapping a hand on Uban's back, he announced, "Well, I think I'll turn in. We've more ahead of us tomorrow, and it'll be good to get an early start."

At that, he left his apprentice and sat with his captain briefly, before going to the tent he shared with Berlin to sleep.