After he's stopped being skeptical of the old woman and looking for an easy way into the tower, Xas's hesitation still lasts longer than he will ever admit to anyone in Baedal - but not nearly as long as his kind would consider becoming. People die, one way or another. They drown, or their hearts fail, or they kill one another. There are no unnatural causes. What is unnatural is for Xas to care. It's uncouth for him to mourn. It's insulting for him to interfere, to try jealously to hold his friends out of time.

But he puts aside the thought of his Father's cold, gentle disappointment and his brothers' haughty disdain - because they're not here, and also fuck them - and heads for Gallmarch. On the way he sends a few unanswered messages to the mermaid's other friends and slides back into the quietly aggressive unapproachability that he used to wear all of the time.

It works: he passes a few familiar faces, but none of them would be useful, and none of them try to stop him. No one stops him when he unties a boat that doesn't belong to him, either, and drops his backpack into it and jumps in lightly behind it. He does it like he knows what he's doing, and it isn't until he's out in the water, peering first at the horizon and then over the edge of the boat, that he decides he doesn't actually have a clue.