lingering, slow, and expensive disease. Paying for her medicine cost the family nearly everything they had. Before she died, she clutched her son close and whispered that she’d lied about his father because she was jealous. “He never took me on a single one of his adventures,” she said, “even though I wanted to go. He hurt me, but he didn’t lie to you.” Now, she said, she was embarking on her own adventure at last. Then she closed her eyes and died.
In short order, then, he lost both of his parents and found himself suddenly an orphan with a sister to care for.
Loctrean inherited his father’s house and the fishing boat, which is to say he inherited debt. The house fell into further disrepair. He couldn’t afford so much as to replace the wine-colored awning over the door, which was too threadbare to keep even light rain from spilling through.
His father’s boat remained in the courtyard. Its smashed planks grew so rotten that it would never be seaworthy again. He felt like that boat, as if a hole had been punched through him, never to be healed.
He could not repair the boat in order to fish, which was all he knew how to do, nor could he afford to buy a new one. There were a few fishing crews on the span but none of them would hire him as they believed he was the same as his father, a dreamer who would be a danger to the others who sailed with him. Even the kindest of them explained to him that they couldn’t take such a risk.
The only good news came when his sister married a neighboring grocer. The grocer made just enough money for the two of them and had nothing left over to help with the debts their father had left, but at least his sister was looked after, and Loctrean took solace in that.
He accepted that he was going to lose his father’s house and there was nothing he could do about it. He determined that he must sell the property for whatever he could get, pay off all the debts, and use whatever was left over to start again somewhere else.
The night he made this decision, however, Loctrean’s father appeared to him in a dream. “You must close up the house,” said the vision, “but not sell it. Then travel to the span of Perla. There you will find your fortune.”
“So it’s true, you are dead,” Loctrean said sadly.
“I drowned. It wasn’t any fun.”
“And how is Mother?” he asked.
“No longer in pain,” his father’s shade replied. “You were a good son to her. A good brother to your sister, too.”
“Thank you,” he said, and a longing to embrace his father welled up inside him. He wanted to reach out and hug the man, but in the dream he seemed unable to do anything but stand and observe.
“Never mind all that,” his father admonished him. “Just wake up and go!” With that the dream ended, and Loctrean awoke.
Well, he thought, I suppose it’s no worse an idea than what I was going to do. I wish, though, I’d asked him to tell me one of his stories. That would have been nice.
As instructed, Loctrean closed up the house, and with his remaining coins he set out for Perla.
Perla was an ancient town built upon a broad peninsula of land that jutted off the side of a span far removed from Guhnavra. It wasn’t even on the shore; to get to it, a boat had to sail up a dark and forbidding river. Perla had a reputation as a dark place, surrounded by marshes and swamps, ghostly lights, and thieves who preyed upon the spans above. The air was tinged with the stink of sulfur long before the city came into view. Loctrean couldn’t help but wonder why his father was sending him there of all places, or even how his father might have been familiar with it. Still, he could not imagine refusing to obey the wishes of his father’s shade, and he booked passage on a ship that took him as far as the nearest spiral; there he had to sign on as a crew member to make the remainder of the journey. The captain of that ship worked him hard, too. He learned to tack and wear, to sound depths, and even to bake biscuits for the crew. There was no job aboard ship that he didn’t learn before they had reached the