Emmarelda deliberately prodded the wound, eliciting a grunt of pain from Wil. 

“What the hell!?” he demanded.

“That is for thinking I was the the Bride of Darkness,” she informed him tartly.

“In my defense I had it on the authority of the most reputable hags!” he half squeaked. Emmarelda relented and let go. She plucked a thread of silk from her scarf and gently tugged it free, drawing the bright red thread slowly until she had about a yard of silk. That accomplished she drew a needle from her cuff. She snapped her fingers and a small flame sprang into existence above her pointer finger. She thrust the tip of the needle into the flame and heated it, then quenched it in the whiskey with a pungent hiss.

“What are you…”

Emmarelda thrust the needlepoint into will and began to sew, tugging the silk through in a series of neat stitches.Wil winced each time she sunk the point and tugged the thread but he refrained from crying out.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a seamstress,” he admitted as she tied off her handiwork. 

“We are a practical people,” she replied enigmatically.

“What should we do now?” Emmarelda asked, sitting back on her own palette and taking a slug of whiskey. She shook her fingers and the blood staining them dried and flaked off with unnatural efficiency.


“The man you saw on the ship.. did you know him?” Wil asked. Emmarelda was silent for a long moment.

“No… I… I don’t think that it was a man. There are legends of those whose deeds were so abominable that Il-who-broke-the-earth cursed them to roam the earth forever. There was something about him… something old and vile…”


“What else do these legends say?” Wil asked, leaning forward eagerly despite his evident exhaustion.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“You don’t know?” he demanded. She shrugged her shoulders.

“This is something that old people say when they are drunk! No one believes it!” she snapped, her own exhaustion and fear fraying her nerves.

“Well whatever he is, he needs to be stopped, we should get moving…” Wil tried to sit up but Emmarelda put three fingers on his chest and pushed him down without difficulty.

“The roads will be swarming with Goats, and you are exhausted,” she pointed out. “He cannot travel by day and he was still at sea.”

“He looked like he was about to make landfall last night, I could see the coast!” Wil objected.

“That hadn’t happened yet,” Emmarelda replied absently.


“Hadn’t… happened? Like it is in the future, how do you know?”

“Have you ever scried with a crystal ball?” Emmarelda demanded.

“Uh…no?”

“Then either cross my palm with more silver or take my word for it,” she snapped. THere was a brief awkward silence.

“Fine. So he hasn’t arrived yet, how does that help us?”

“If we can get to the shore before he reaches it … I might be able to stop him from landing,” she admitted.

“Like… stop him how?”

Emmarelda sighed tiredly but looked up at Wil, her large eyes almost luminous in the dark of the chapel.

“You are from Alba, you know better than most that a land has a … a dusa… what would you call it,” for a moment she struggled with the language unused to thinking in magical terms beyond her native tongue. “A spirit? A soul?” Wil nodded his head in understanding so she pressed on.

“If you know where a person will first set foot in a land there are ways to make it anathema to them, to set the very earth against them,” she explained.

“Will that kill him?” Wil asked.

“I mean… unless he is a really good swimmer,” Emmarelda replied with a tired smile.