“Eight years,” he sighed as he y in his old bed, whiiko had so graciously lent to him after he’d e back. “I waited for five years only to be told to wait for anht. Who does that?”

  Part of him wao say fuck it and just leave, but he knew he couldn’t abandon his own child like that. Son, he corrected himself; Elthena seemed to be pretty certain she was going to have a son. She must have seen that in her vision.

  It was a sleepless night for him and a heartbreaking ooo. He sidered getting drunk again but decided that was an uhy g meism. So, instead, he tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do with another decade.

  He didn’t figure it out, though, not that night or in the day that followed. It wasn’t for almost a week, when he was helping one of the older fishermen recaulk the seams in his boat, that he decided what the right answer was. If he was going to end up being a teacher, then he was going to teach people. It wasn’t like he had a skill for that, but Simon was sure that he was in no way naturally tale it, either.

  He spent a few weeks trying to teach a couple of the other boys and girls of the narrows how to write their names and learn the most basic letters, but they showed no more i in the subject than Niko had. “I told you,” his former apprentice ughed. “That stuff’s a waste of time!”

  “You learned, eventually,” Simon tered.

  “Yeah, but only because you made me,” Niko ughed. “And what do I do with it? The math tricks you taught me be helpful, but the letters? What is it I'm supposed to read?”

  That was a good point. Other than Simon’s own journal, he didn’t really have anything for these kids to read. He didn’t have any adventure books or horror stories to share with them. So, it was like teag them to use a puter without them the video games that would keep them pying and learning.

  Simon thought about it for days but had no good ahe proper thing to do would be to kick off an industrial revolution and create movable type and printing presses, but that would take forever and require a lot more mohan he had at his disposal.

  So, eventually, he started to teach the children swordpy with wooden ons because it was easier to draw students. That, at least, they flocked to. Soon, that was what almost every young man in the vilge did iernoon after their chores were done. He couldn’t get them to muster up any energy to draw symbols in the sand with sticks, but somehow, more than a dozen boys and girls could find the energy to swing wooden swords around with all their might.

  That was fun, and a couple of them showed some promise, too, but eventually, he decided that this robably a dead end. Much to Niko’s disappoi, he started taking longer and lorips abroad once more.

  His jourarted out simple and almost aimless. He went north along the coast, stopping in vilges along the way every night, where he would trade stories and a little bor for a pce to sleep and a simple seafood meal. Sometimes, he would help the local bcksmith or herbalist, and other times, we would just tribute menial bor, hanging fish racks or scrubbing barnacles off the bottom of beached boats.

  None of it articurly hard work, and along the way, he would gather certain minerals and broken shells for the part of his pn, which was slowly taking shape in his mind. He’d been given anht years, which felt like a prisoenside the rge prisoehat the Pit already was. During that time, he probably shouldn’t fight monsters if he could avoid it because dying would plicate things.

  That part might have been easy enough, but in that time, he also had to bee an excellent teacher for his son and attraough notid renown that it would make sense for the queen to hire him without her court raising any eyebrows and being the highly admired bcksmith of Olven’s Narrows was hardly going to cut it.

  “That’s more her problem than mine,” he told himself, but really, his pride wouldn’t allow that ao stibsp;

  He’d gotten famous several times as a monster hunter and more than once as a healer, but beyond that, well, he felt like there was more he could do. So, this time, he tried art.

  For the st few years, he’d been drawing and painting, but he’d preserved very little of his work. It had all been scribbled on his walls or scratched into the sand, and the day they were gone. Now, though, he'd decided to think bigger.

  Simon didn’t have much experience painting, no matter what Niko said, but he did have a lot of experience drawing on walls, so he decided to try his hand at making a fresco. The first one he did was in a moderately sized town just south of the rger city of Thebian. He didn’t even have all of the colors for that project. Because of the geology of that area, Bck, red, brown, and yellow were pretty on in the form of various cys. Blue, green, and purple, though, were basically ent. There were blue dyes for clothing, and he’d seen some green pzes in some cities that probably had something to do with copper, but that retty much it.

  His first project was simple enough, anyway. After spending a m slig and dig some of the rge fish that a man had caught the night before, Simon casually mentioned how much better the fishmarket would look with a little decoration. The red-tiled pza and the colorful awnings were picturesque, but the pin white stuccoed building that the fish were sold from, along with the pin wooden stalls in front of it, looked almost out of pbsp;

  Mercuto was taken with the idea almost immediately, but then Simon suspected he would be. He roud man with a rge enough operation that several men worked for him, but it was well below where he saw himself in life. As far as he was ed, he should be running his town, or maybe Thebian or Ionaia itself, and proud men were generally pretty easy to lead around by the nose.

  That night, Simon used some of his precious paper to sket image of the big man proudly holding an impossibly rge grouper, and just like that, Mercuto was sold on the idea. The man was only willing to pay a pittance, of course, but Simon didn’t need more than that. His ingredients involved grinding bones and shells, along with trips to the mountains for coal and cy. His mediums were limited. He could use eggs to make tempura like paints, or he could use cys to bind together something closer to pastel sticks with a binder and a little pressure. Still, all that took was time, and that was the one currency that Simon was ri.

  He spent weeks in preparation, gathering everything and ying out the images, but once he got started, it was done ihan forty-eight hours. Well, not everything was done. He’d still have to mix paint to redo the stands io make them more eye-catg, but the wall art was pleted in record time. Once he started, he just couldn’t stop. In fact, pausing to mix another batch of bck or ocher so he could keep going was the most annoying part. Though he’d never really needed an apprentice while he was a bcksmith, he would have loved one just now.

  Sadly, he was a nobody without a lucrative career to offer to a young man. He was just a homeless guy who liked to draw and had some time to kill. So, he’d have to do it himself.

  Though Simon was not pletely happy with the final result, his employer was thrilled and paid him more than the agreed-upon amount. He offered to let Simon paint his boat , but Simon knew just enough about paints to know that nothing he created would st long in the sea. He was trying to create art that people would notice, and in that, at least, he succeeded. Before the week was out, Simon had offers from three other merts seeking simir treatment. Two just wahe extra vivid reds and yellows he’d worked out how to create, but in the end, it was the third one he went with.

  The local cooper had heard the hat the queen’s virtue and chastity had stopped Mount Karkosia from erupting, and though he’d long siablished a meager shrine on the side of his shop, he wao make it grander and more noticeable. Though the cooper was much less well off than Simon’s previous t, he paid nearly as much, but truthfully, that was one project that Simon probably would have done for free.

  His first job had been a test of teiques and materials more than anything, but this one, he vowed, would be a work of art worthy of Elthena, even though he doubted that she would ever see it. Simon pnned all of it carefully. He built scaffolding, fetched more materials thahought he would use, and patched the building's stucco before he began to ehat what he made would st for a long time. This time, it took nearly a month to get everything ready, but it was worth the wait.

  Simon’s painting had attracted attention st time, even though it had been doer market hours so as not to harm the fishmonger’s business. This time, though, he paihroughout the day, and often many of the passersby would stop to watch. He’d hought of painting as eai, but at least while he did this project, it brought new meaning to watg paint dry.

  He did the background of the work in deep reds, es, and browns, which were among the best colors he had access to. In the fround, though, he painted Elthena only in bd white, creating as stark a trast as possible. For her pose, he chose a beatific expression of prayer, and though he didn’t know for a fact that he robably ripping off some cssic pose involving the Virgin Mary, he suspected that was the case. Oh, he hadn’t beeely religious, but he recalled that his mother had, and there were more than a few of those sorts of is scattered throughout the house.

  The background was vivid, though because of how inspired he was by the fiery mountain, it took only two days, which was nothing, given its size. It did a good job of depig Ionar as only he had seen it that night. The queen, though, he agonized on for over a week, aill wasn’t pletely happy about it.

  Everyohought he’d done an amazing job, but then, they’d never seen the queen before. He had, though, more than most, so there was no excuse for his imperfe.

  In the end, there wasn’t a single feature he could point to that was the problem, though. Her eyes were just as kind as the real woman’s, and even though her mouth was almost eight feet wide in his fresco, it was every bit as full and kissable as Elthena’s actually was. There was nothing wrong with it, but to him, it just cked that spark.

  No one agreed with him. Not the cooper who was ecstatic about the whole thing, nor the townspeople who began to pray there much more often as a result, nor even the riobility who traveled from Thebian and even further away to see what rumors were calling a masterpiece.