Sagar gripped the knobs of Wanderlust's wheel so tight his fingernails dug into the wood.

He checked the compass fixed into the centre of the wheel. On course.

The shantysinger, Quel (what sort of a name was that?), had given him some notional directions, but at this point in the journey it was pretty easy to work out which to go, really: to get to Umbar from Farr you either had to fly east by south-east or west by south-west and he had chosen the latter, since this way they were less likely to be intercepted by Morekemian vessels.

What was more difficult was navigating by night. It was cloudy over the Atlantean ocean, and he was flying below cloud level, to avoid detection, which meant there were no stars to see by. There was only the vast darkness of the sea stretching out on all sides of them, a cresting wave occasionally picked out by a shaft of moonlight that snuck past the cloud cover.

Sagar had to keep looking back at the compass needle, visible against the circle of its painted fluorescent white background, readjusting the wheel and then trying to hold it steady so as not to drift off course. Inevitably his attention and gaze would wander off, and he would have to bring them back again.

In the gaps between bringing them back, bitterness assaulted him. Why had the stupid pup voted to come this way? Why couldn't he have seen sense and voted to go after the Wind Shell as well, like Sagar had wanted to do?

He bit down and gave a low growl. He wanted to track down his father, to find him and give him a piece of his mind for everything the man had done to him, to get the rest of the Wind Shell back.

He wanted Hiuna back, too, felt grief stab at him like a sword blade going into his heart. How could he miss someone so much who he had only known for a day, for less than a day?

Yet miss her he did.

His gaze had wandered off over the darkness of the ocean again. He forced it back to the compass, and corrected.

How he missed Hiuna. He could remember the whole of their conversation in that Farrian inn as though it was only only yesterday, which it almost was.

They had walked into the inn's common room together after he had forfeited his match at the tournament to go off with her.

She led them to a little round table in a corner of the room with just two chairs, away from the bar, so they could talk freely—not that there were many people in here; they were all watching the tournament.

He remembered the glow of fierce beauty in her tomboyish but undeniably feminine face, with her narrow Farrian eyes and rebellious smile, as she had taken a seat and gestured for him to do the same.

He could remember every exact word of their conversation perfectly. Maybe time would jumble it up, but for now they were so fresh and vivid in his mind that he knew them precisely.

"Sit," she commanded him, and Sagar would have bristled at being bossed around by anyone else, but with her he let it slide. Maybe it was just the Farrian way of speaking.

He obliged her, and she launched straight into what she wanted to say, not beating around the bush: "Why did you kiss me back there during our match?" Her long dark braid bobbed as she spoke.

Sagar laughed. "Is that all you dragged me out here to ask? I kissed you because I wanted to."

"You definitely didn't do it because you wanted to take me by surprise so you could win the match?"

"No," said Sagar, and to his surprise he found that he wasn't lying. "I wasn't thinking about that. I just did it. I kissed you because I wanted to." "Well why did you want to?" pushed Huna, brows creasing in puzzlement.

Sagar found a confidence rising up in himself that he had only ever pretended to have before, but had never been able to completely pull off. "Why does anyone want to kiss anyone else?" he said. "I did it because I wanted to. I did it because I like you, woman. I'm attracted to you."

Sagar's cheek stung and he found himself looking at the wall to his right. The woman had slapped him.

"How dare you tell me that you're attracted to me?" she burst forth. "My whole life I've had to work to prove that as a woman I can do what men do just as well as they do, and I finally manage to do that and you go and objectify me for being a woman, and then beat me!" There were tears welling in her eyes, through she didn't let them drop.

"Woah now!" said Sagar, holding up his hands. "Who said anything about 'objectificating' you?" He had to guess what that word meant, but he thought he had a pretty good idea. "I didn't just want to kiss you, I wanted to get to know you and stuff too." He had heard that was the sort of thing you were meant to say—but he was surprised that he meant that, too.

Hiuna's expression softened a little. Seeing that he had some momentum, Sagar kept going. "And what do you mean you've worked your whole life to prove you can do what a man do? Tell me more about that."

Hiuna fixed him with her dark brown eyes, deadly serious, and for a moment what looked like suspicion flickered in them. But then she said, "Ever since I was small, I've been a fighter. I love to fight. I fought with my brothers. I fought with my brothers' friends. By the age of ten I could beat any of them in a fight. I could protect myself from any boy or man who might try anything with me. By the age of twelve I was protecting them from other people. Bullies. Adults. Robbers. But in Farr, like with most places, fighting is a man's sport, and only men can become monks. So, to prove myself and show I could fight as well as any man or monk, I disguised myself as a man and started entering fighting tournaments. At first I would only get so far, but then I started winning them. I won a lot of them. The Tenkachi tournament was the first one where I decided to enter as a woman, and I was still allowed to compete because of the reputation I had built. And I would have won it as well, but then you had to come up against me with your strange air tricks, and then you kissed me and to my disgust I found that I actually wanted to kiss you back…"

Sagar's heart—and loins—leapt. So it hadn't just been a reflex action. But she had said 'disgust' as well as 'wanted'… He was confused.

"What's so bad about that?" he asked.

"I don't have time for anything like that!" Hiuna said, throwing up her hands. He liked how passionate she was. "I've never been interested in men in that way before! I was here to show I can hold my own just as well as any man, not start kissing one! And no man has been interested in me in that way either, at least not since I cut my hair short and started pretending to be a man." Sagar chose to ignore that last sentence. He didn't really want to think about it too hard. "But then you come along," continued Hiuna, "with your air tricks and your kissing, and apparently you really are interested, and it wasn't just a way to beat me!? Who are you? Where did you come from, you big ponytailed prick? And how are you able to do that stuff with the air?"

Sagar took a deep breath. Was he going to tell her?

"Alright," he said. Here we go. "My name is Captain Sagaro Vigaroson Edbini. My father is Vigaro Sagarson Edbini—a famous Imfisi skypirate. But for most of my life I didn't know that. I grew up on my father's ship, as a cabin boy—but I didn't know that he was my father. I thought I was just a stray orphan who had been abandoned by his parents and taken in by the crew to do menial chores, as that was what they told me. Which was half true. Growing up on the ship, the crew taught me to fight—with bare knuckles, or cutlass—to navigate, to plan raids, to drink, to cuss—all the ways of the skypirate. Eventually I progressed from being a cabin boy to being a fully-fledged member of the crew—and one of the best, at that. Then, on his sixtieth birthday—when I was eighteen—Captain Vigaro announced to me that I was his son who he had got on some Imfisi serving girl who tracked him down and dumped me on him after she had given birth. He also announced to me that he was retiring from piracy, heading off to a secret location with all his mates to enjoy the rest of their lives, and that I was inheriting his title, his reputation, and his ship, the Wanderlust, and would need to find a new crew for it. He also broke off a fragment of shell that he wore around his neck, told me that it was the secret to his success and would give me elemental wind-manipulation powers, then buggered off."

Sagar sighed as he finished his story. He hadn't told anyone else in the whole of Mid all of this. Not even the engineer woman on their recent tavern trip. Hiuna had drawn it out of him. She was still looking at him, taut eyelids pulled even further into a frown. Did she believe him?

"And where did your father get this 'magical shell'?" She didn't believe him.

"He…didn't say. He never told me. But I'm beginning to suspect it had something to do with one of the people I'm traveling with at the moment. An old man…"

"Why?"

"He knows a lot about things like the Shell. And all this weird poodoo keeps happening around our group. Coincidences and stuff. I'm not sure what to make of it all, to tell you the truth. It's enough to make a man superstitious." He would never admit that to anyone else in the group, either.

"Did you find a new crew for your ship?" Hiuna asked. She did believe him. And she had actually been listening to him.

"Yeah. It wasn't took difficult to find a willig pirae crew in Imfis, especially for the 'Lust. Hiring a load of good-for-nothing skysailors was easy enough. The hard part was convincing them that I was a ruthless and fear-inspiring captain myself, when I'm so young. To tell you the truth, I wasn't doing a very good job of it. I might have just been starting to make some progress, but then I got them all killed…"

"What?!"

"Yeah. We took down an Imperial [frigate], but then the General that had been on it tracked down our ship to an Imfisi port and butchered them while I was ashore recruiting a new engineer."

"Blessed Eto…" said Hiuna.

Why was Sagar telling her all these things? He liked her short dark hair. He liked the delicate curve of her cheek. He liked the shape of her small round breasts.

"Hmmm…" said Hiuna, her frown deepening further, making her look deeply suspicious.

"What?"

"I do not think we are too different, you and me."

"How so?" What did she mean? Gods, she wasn't about to tell him that they had the same father like Elrann had, was she?! Please let her not be about to say that. Please Ixis, please The One, please Yntrik. Please Cheatoh, or whatever the name of the ridiculous god they worship here is.

"What I mean is…" said Hiuna. "…it sounds like both of us have spent the whole of our lives trying to prove ourselves. To men. You, to your crew and everyone else that you can be a successful skpirate, and me that I can be a successful fighter. And both of us wer on the cusp of succeeding, but then had our success ripped away from us by forces outside of our control."

Sagar looked up and to one side as he pondered this for a moment. "I suppose you might be right…" he said.

Hiuna leaned in close, and the skin of Sagar's face tingled. He could smell the fruity tang of the wine they had ordered on her breath. She spoke quietly. "Well, the difference with me, Sagaro Vigaroson Edbini, is that I'm not a man, and you don't need to prove anything to me, except that you meant it when you kissed me earlier and it wasn't just a ploy to beat me in the tournament."

Sagar gulped. "Er. And just how would I do that?"

"You'll have to show me again. Come on. Show me that you really meant it."

She leant in further, lips puckered, tilting her head slightly and closing her eyes.

"Wait!" said Sagar on reflex, as surprised by himself as anybody.

Hiuna's eyes popped open and she pulled back her head in confusion.

"What?" she said, back on guard.

Sagar didn't know why he was doing this, but he did it all the same. He reached his hand up to his face and pulled off the eye patch he wore over his left eye, revealing the perfectly healthy eye underneath. It was good to be able to see with both eyes again. Especially to look at her, though now she wore a puzzled expression.

"I just wear it for show," he explained. "I pretend that I lost it in a vicious skybattle."

Hiuna nodded, as if she understood perfectly. "Come here," she said.

She leaned in again, and Sagar discovered that he might as well have kept the patch on because he automatically shut his eyes.

Her lips were hot on his mouth, and she kissed him gently at first, investigatively, but then his tongue quested out a little, and met hers, and then her lips parted further for him and all at once she was pulling him towards her, and him her towards him, and she was grasping at his back and he was pawing at her face. A wind stirred in Sagar such as he had never known before.

"Hey!" someone called from over at the bar. "You two! Get a room!"

Hiuna broke the kiss, and Sagar was left shell-shocked, mouth open, tongue loose.

"Okay then," Hiuna said to the innkeeper, and shrugged.

"Twenty gold pieces!" the innkeeper called back. "Up the stairs and third door on your right. And don't make too much noise!"

"Done!" said Hiuna, then, to Sagar, "Come on." Her eyes glittered wickedly. "You're about to be very successful."

She took his hand, pulled him up from his chair, and led him towards the stairs, to the sound of various catcalls and whistles from the handful of patrons.

Sagar ignored them. He couldn't believe his luck. He was about to make it with a woman! A woman who looked a bit like a man, but never mind! Apparently that was his favourite kind! He wondered if he was in love.

As they reached the top of the stairs, shouts and screams sounded from somewhere outside. He and Hiuna froze in their tracks, and looked at each other.

"What was that?" Hiuna said.

The sound of cannons firing. More screaming. An impact, somewhere close, which shook the whole building.

The door to the inn burst open. An elderly Farrian.

"We're being attacked by Morekemia!" he shouted.

"What?!" said Hiuna. She ran down the stairs, dragging Sagar with her in the reverse direction. Damn, Sagar thought. Whatever this is, couldn't it have waited just a little longer? A quarter of an hour? Five minutes? Twenty seconds?

And then he and Hiuna had run out into the streets, and seen the Morekemian attack, and then Elrann had found them.

After that his memory blended into the battle that had come after, and what had happened after that…

But Sagar didn't want to think about that now. He couldn't.

Damn the Imperials, he thought bitterly as he looked out over the dark sky somewhere above the Atlantean ocean. Damn them to the deepest, darkest circle of hell. Damn Morekemia. Damn that Imperial General, Ulthis. Damn the Emperor.

He had been so close to making it with a woman. Right on the point of it, and they had interrupted him.

But worse, infinitely worse even than that, he found, they had taken her away from him. He didn't just want to make it with a woman any more. He wanted to make it with her. No, he wanted to be with her. He wanted to be around her. He wanted her to be around, still.

He blinked rare tears away in the cold night air. He had never felt this way about a person before, and after such a short time. Maybe he had been in love with her, or falling in love with her.

But now he would never know. Now she was beyond his reach—forever.

Sagar gritted his teeth so hard they hurt, and gripped the ship's wheel still tighter, and vowed there and then that he would get revenge on the Empire for what they had done to him—for who they had taken away from him.

I will avenge you, Hiuna. I will find these Jewels and personally kill the Emperor of Morekemia myself, if I can. And in your honour I will acquire more gold, gemstones and beautiful women than anyone ever has before.

His tears had spilled out now, and were streaming off his cheeks in the rushing air.

Sagar flew on through the night.