The Rock was a beautiful place. It didn't have many trees, except in a few places which had been planted as orchards, but there was soft springy turf, and the salty smell which constantly reminded them that the sea wasn't far off. Most of the paths ran steeply up and down between peaks of the island, with a few flat places here and there that must have been levelled deliberately. In one of these, Fezzik met a man who challenged him to a wrestling match. The man was big by normal standards, around six foot six or six foot seven, broad-shouldered and muscular, but he still seemed small compared to Fezzik. He was also older, around sixty or so, but had evidently kept himself in shape. And from his grim face, he could easily make up in aggression what he lacked in youth, and seemed relieved at the challenge of having someone bigger than himself to fight for once.

'Uh, I don't usually fight just one person at a time,' said Fezzik.

'Need to stay in training,' said the man in the brown and silver uniform.

'All right,' said Fezzik amiably. 'Do you want to watch?' he asked Buttercup.

'No, I think I need some time on my own. This has all been a bit much to take in.'

'All right. I'll meet up with you again in a bit.'

She walked on further, up and down another peak and valley, and out onto a coast path which led along near the cliff-tops. Turning a corner, she saw behind a boulder something that made her freeze in terror. Him. If she screamed, could Fezzik get there in time to save her? Or would he return to serving his old master?

Looking more carefully, she realised that the man wasn't Vizzini. He was short and humpbacked, with one leg shorter than the other, but he was much fatter than Vizzini. He was dressed entirely in black, like Westley, but he didn't look like a pirate – or not the swashbuckling kind of pirate, anyway. More a corporate pirate who could board your company and take it over before you knew what was happening.

The short man, seeing her panic and confusion, looked over at her. 'Did I do something wrong?' he asked. 'I'm not good at dealing with people.'

He was young, she realised, probably only a few years older than she was: in his early twenties at most.

'No, it's all right,' she said. 'I just mistook you for someone else, for a moment.'

'There's a surprise!' said the man bitterly. 'It's an occupational hazard of having a famous brother.'

'You're Vizzini's brother?' She had no idea whether Vizzini had any family. In the short time that Inigo and Fezzik had been her friends rather than enemies, she had learnt virtually everything about their lives, but they had apparently learnt nothing about Vizzini's background in all the years they had travelled with him. He was Vizzini. When you were down and out, he made you an offer you couldn't refuse, gave your life direction again by making you his henchman. That was all there was to it. They didn't even know for sure whether Vizzini was his real name, or whether he was genuinely Sicilian. Vizzini with parents, a brother, a wife or girlfriend, maybe children who were now orphans being brought up by their grandparents, was – inconceivable. But if this man was Vizzini's brother, he would want revenge…

'Not unless that's yet another of Miles's aliases that I wasn't aware of,' said the short man drily. 'I get the impression he mostly sticks with the one cover identity, though.'

'Is your brother a short, devious natural leader with a genius for picking up derelict no-hopers and enabling them to be effective fighters under his command?'

'Yeah, that sounds like Miles.'

'Tells his followers, "The less you think, the happier I'll be,"? Gets impatient with them if they don't want to murder a prisoner?'

'That's not Miles. He'd never harm a prisoner, any more than his – our father would. In fact, from what one of his friends told me, that's how he became admiral of a mercenary fleet in the first place. He'd taken up smuggling with a few friends, including her and her father, got attacked by mercenaries and managed to knock them out and take them captive. When her father said they should be practical and kill them, Miles refused, so he had to work out what he was going to do with them instead, and conned them into believing he was the admiral of a far superior elite mercenary fleet, and that if they could shape up, he might be interested in recruiting them. And he certainly wouldn't tell people not to think. He inspires people to be their best selves. He's charismatic. Like my mother. And my father. And pretty much everyone in our family except me,' he sighed.

'He sounds like my boyfriend.'

'That could be Miles. He's got quite the harem. At least three members of his crew that I've met are madly in love with him, regardless of gender. Or species. But the original girl he had a crush on when they set off isn't one of them. She's been married to someone else for over a decade now, and Miles still doesn't like accepting that she only likes him as a friend. He hates to admit defeat. So, what's your boyfriend like?'

'Just – perfect.'

'Never think that, about anyone,' said the man forcefully. 'I used to think that way about Miles, too – that he was what I could never be, that I was just an imitation version of him. I didn't even have a name until Miles named me, the first time we met, when I was eighteen. And I wasn't willing to accept the name he gave me – I didn't want to be his brother, didn't want to come home with him and meet his – our parents. But I couldn't think of another name I liked, either. And it wasn't until I did meet my parents that I realised that from their point of view, Miles isn't some perfect hero, he's just another loony like me who's crazy in a slightly different way, and that to them, I was their son just as much as Miles was, even if they hadn't known I existed until I was an adult. And that was when my life started.'

This raised so many questions that Buttercup wasn't sure how to begin asking most of them, so she started with the simplest. 'What is your name?'

'Mark.'

'Hello, Mark. I'm Buttercup. My boyfriend's name is Westley, alias Dread Pirate Roberts. Currently deceased.'

She had hoped to baffle Mark as much with this as he had with the reference to not having met his own parents until he was an adult, but he seemed completely unsurprised and just asked, 'Revivable?'

'Yes.'

'What happened to him?'

'My fiancé had him tortured to death.'

Mark nodded seriously. 'Do you know anyone else that's happened to?'

'No! I didn't even know you could recover from being dead.'

'Being dead isn't the problem,' said Mark. 'My brother was dead for a while last year, and he recovered completely – well, mostly. It turned out that he'd picked up a seizure disorder that ended his military career, but he found a new career as a detective shortly after that. Not that he deigned to tell me about the seizures, but, fair's fair, I don't tell him about some of the things that have happened to me when I got captured while looking for him, and the damage they left me with.'

Buttercup knew that she wasn't very bright – nobody in their group except Westley was much good at coming up with ideas, but she was fairly sure that even Fezzik was more intelligent than she was – but she could see where this was going. 'Did you get tortured?' she asked.

'Yes. I won,' Mark added hastily, defensively. 'When the Baron got tired of having his goons work me over, and had me brought before him, I kicked him to death with my bare feet – my hands were chained behind my back – and acquired a sizeable fortune from him. I could've taken over being Baron if I'd wanted, but what I wanted was to go home, and to do something worthwhile with all this wealth I'd come into.

'But – winning comes at a cost. There are tricks you have to learn to survive being tortured – survive mentally, I mean, to refuse to let the torturer make you his slave. When your boyfriend wakes up, he might not be the same person. He might not even be just one person any more. If he's turned into five different people, some of whom are crazy and dangerous, are you still going to be able to love all of him?'

'Ye…' Buttercup began, and then she remembered something. 'When Westley confronted my fiancé – he said that if Humperdinck wouldn't surrender right now, Westley wouldn't fight to the death, he'd fight to the pain. He gave this weird gloating speech about how he was going to keep Humperdinck and cut bits off him, one at a time, and finally dump him as a blind, crippled, disfigured beggar. I mean, I think he was mainly just trying to frighten Humperdinck into surrendering, but I think he'd have gone through with it if Humperdinck hadn't surrendered. He sounded as if he'd thought about it a lot, and as if he'd enjoy doing it. It's not surprising, considering what Humperdinck and his friend had done to Westley, but even so – it was a bit creepy.'

'Yes,' said Mark grimly, sounding as if her words had connected with something in his own memory. 'When I got tortured, it released my inner assassin – and my inner masochist. I don't seem to have an inner sadist. But if Westley does, and it wasn't just an act – if he turns out to be a monster not so different from the monster he rescued you from – do you still want to be with him?'

'I – I don't know,' Buttercup admitted. 'I didn't know him very well even before all this. I just thought he was perfect. And maybe he thought I was perfect, too. But if he has turned into someone like Prince Humperdinck or Count Rugen – or if deep down he was like that all along – I don't know! I can't not love him! Only – maybe we need time to get to know each other and decide if we even like each other.'

'Monsters aren't all bad,' said Mark. 'There's a friend of mine here on the Rock who actually is the sort of person who enjoys torturing people to death – not just someone who can be an assassin when he needs to, like me, or a soldier like my brother and my father. And yet – he was a good friend of my family, someone who was like a second father to my brother, and they missed him when he died – as in permanently dead, not just revivably dead – and I'd heard so much about him from them that I came here to find him. I like him. In some ways, I have more in common with him than like either of my biological parents, and maybe they were able to accept me because they'd known him for long enough that they were used to weirdness. He could have been a villain, but instead he's – just someone who's trying to be a good person, and succeeding about as well as most people do, and better in some ways. He just sometimes needs help keeping his inner monster under control. I'm okay at keeping my inner monsters on a leash by myself. Therapy helped. And so did having a loving family and a wonderful girlfriend.'

Buttercup was starting to realise that, even if she was currently the most beautiful woman in the world – which wouldn't necessarily last for very long – she wasn't necessarily a wonderful girlfriend. But all the same, she and Inigo and Fezzik needed to be good friends to Westley as he recovered, and that meant not relying on him to make the decisions, and not assuming he was perfect.

'Well,' she said, 'let's see what happens.'