CHAPTER 3-2
Heinrich

Over breakfast, Áthas finally made the big reveal about the day's activity: there was to be an hours-long game of capture the flag. Heinrich, Fynn, and the triplets would be on one team, with Phoenix, Klara, Emyr, Siân, and Acair on the other, and Áthas refereeing. Heinrich wasn't at all sure how he felt about being separated from his brother, but didn't have time to ponder the anxiety-inducing ramifications of this, for Áthas had more to tell them.

"The flags will be placed at and defended from two points," she said. "One will be right over there where the plain of Prisoners' Point meets its beach. The other will be the end of the dock facing the Drowned Channel where we first disembarked two days ago. Now Olwen," she said, turning to the breathlessly excited girl, "as our official winner up until later on tonight, you get to choose which flag location you will be defending."

"One moment, please," Olwen said to Áthas before turning to her new teammates and barking authoritatively, "Huddle!"

Heinrich, Fynn, and the triplets gathered into a tight circle to discuss. Heinrich couldn't help but notice, beneath the flat of his palm, how muscular Fynn's back was. He wrenched his attention away to focus on Olwen.

"One will clearly be easier to defend than the other," she was saying, "and that's the one we're going to pick."

"Okay, so which one's easier to defend, then?" Osian asked.

Three almost-identical sets of dark eyes shifted, for some reason, to Heinrich. "Uh," he stammered. "Well..." He thought back to the dock on the beach where they had spent their first night, and looked past Osian's and Owain's shoulders to Prisoners' Point beyond. "We'll defend here," he heard himself saying.

"Yeah?" said Fynn, thankfully not in a skeptical tone. Instead, he sounded interested in what Heinrich had to say.

This, of course, made Heinrich notice, yet again, how dry his mouth suddenly was. Still, he managed to force his next words out, and even sounded approximately confident as he did so, to boot: "Yeah. Because the water there is swimmable, but here, it mostly isn't, thanks to the currents. If we're defending the dock, we'll have to be on the lookout for attacks coming from land and by sea."

Fynn was nodding, his turquoise eyes alight with enthusiasm for the idea. "And you know what that means."

"What?" asked Owain, not following. "What does it mean?"

"It means we're going to be the ones attacking by sea," Heinrich told the assembled team. "They'll never see it coming." He knew it was their best shot, but even so, his stomach roiled with anxiety, or maybe it was just breakfast disagreeing with him, or perhaps it was actually because Fynn had just nodded again and shot him a handsome, conspiratorial grin.