"No offense taken," King said when Bran informed him that he would be watched over by yet a second villager, this one a man. Honestly, he wouldn't have minded being alone with Annie, but King understood the reason as it was coming from both a village Elder and a father. He joked, "The more the merrier."

King put the now empty dishware back into the basket, stood, and said, "Let's walk." Then, remembering the news about his shipmates on the beach, he suggested, "Maybe [i]uphill?[/i]"

As they headed slowly up the hill in the direction of the village, Annie began hitting King with questions that he was sure had been building up since the moment she'd found him unconscious on the beach.

“Where's Newfoundland…?”

"Where's Newfoundland...?" King asked, "or where's Newfoundland from [i]here?[/i]"

King thought for a moment about what Bran had said about [i]knowledge[/i] and his preference that King not spread it. He didn't see anything wrong with answering this question, [i]vaguely[/i] anyway. "Newfoundland in an island that is -- or was? -- a province of a country called Canada."

That was more or less true. Newfoundland, the island, was actually part of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador. King didn't really think he needed to make that clear to Annie. "As far as where it is from [i]here...?[/i]"

Again, King recalled Bran's warning. "I can't really tell you that, because I don't really know where I am. Your father said this was Greenland, but [i]where[/i] in Greenland? Newfoundland could be to the west, the southwest, the south ... don't know."

Again, that was more or less true, excepting the fact that there was [i]no[/i] way that Newfoundland could be south of Greenland. Again, King didn't think he needed to be clear on that. 

“What's there…?” Annie asked.

"Not much, really," King said, chuckling. "New Eastport was a fishing village. They hunted and foraged in the forests, too."

“How many people live there…?” she pushed on.

"A hundred, I guess," King lied. "It varies."

In truth, New Eastport was a thriving city of almost a thousand residents. They were fishers and hunters like King said, but they were also sea merchants. In addition to more than 40 fishing vessels, the city had a fleet of 20 or more merchant ships that sailed southwest down the New England coast of the United States and northwest along the coast of Labrador, sometimes even venturing all the way into the Hudson Bay.  

He thought it best not to mention the extent of New Eastport's impressive merchant fleet. And if he wasn't going to tell Annie about [i]that[/i], he [i]certainly[/i] wasn't going to tell her that one of their most profitable trade products was people, specifically females. In fact, the cargo of the small sailing vessel from which King had been thrown into the sea by Mother Nature's fury had included a dozen teenage girls destined for the Caroline slave market. 

King and three conspirators -- all of whom had been shanghaied to crew the vessel -- had killed the captain and his loyal crew and hijacked the ship. They'd planned on sailing east for Ireland, England, Europe, [i]wherever[/i], in an attempt to find freedom for all aboard. Obviously, that hadn't happened.

“Are they just like us…?”

[i]No, they most certainly aren't[/i], King thought to himself. But Bran's words kept coming back to him, so he said instead, "Sure, I guess. They work hard, play when they can ... have babies."

“Why'd you leave…?”

King couldn't help but laugh at that question. He would have loved to tell her the truth as it would make him look like quite the hero. But ... Bran! "Like I told your father, I'm a wanderer ... an adventurer. I wanted to see someplace new."

“Where were you trying to go…?”

"Europe," he said, thinking that Annie certainly at least knew the name of the continent that included the country that at one time owned all of Greenland. "Specifically, Ireland or England."

“Who was with you…?”

Again, King would have loved to answer that question in detail. [i]I was freeing a dozen women even younger than you who were going to be sold as sex slaves or forced into birthing children with men they likely would have preferred to avoid.[/i] He couldn't say that, so he said instead, "No one in particular. I was just a crew member, earning my passage by working the rigging. It was a two masted schooner. That's a sailboat, in case you didn't know."

Then, Annie asked a question that he hadn't expected but -- as soon as she asked it -- realized that he [i]should[/i] have. “Are you married?”

"Married ... [i]me?[/i] No," he said, chuckling softly. "I would never do that to a woman." He saw Annie's reaction to his answer and thought maybe he should explain further. "What I mean is ... I'm not the settling down type. Over the last twenty years, I've lived in more than a dozen places. I like to move around ... to see new places ... to meet new people, like you and your father and the rest of your people. If I married, she'd have to pull up roots and go with me. I ... I don't think that's fair."

As they'd been talking, they'd reached and passed through the village; dozens of people -- men and women, old and young -- had stopped what they were doing to simply watch the stranger and his escorts. The man who'd joined King's escort had met them at the top of the hill -- why climb down if King was climbing up, after all -- and he'd followed behind by a couple of dozen yards.

They finally stopped when King could see the ocean out over the cliff to the east. He found a place to sit and just stared at the sea, wondering whether any of the conspirators or the girls they'd been trying to save had made it ashore. 

"I think we should look farther up the shore ... down the shore, too," he said. "If I could make it, someone else might have. They could be hurt ... or lost ... dying of starvation or dehydration or injury. I want you to promise to ask your father to make an effort to find them ... please."

King looked up at the mountain pass and shook his head. It was quite a trail to navigate to perform trade with other communities inland. He found himself wondering what it looked like beyond that pass and the mountains flanking it. He remembered reading in an old book that the ice sheets covering Greenland had compressed the land so far downward that if those sheets ever fully melted away -- which, of course, they had -- that Greenland's interior could become one or [i]many[/i] freshwater lakes; or -- if connected to the sea -- become a massive inland saltwater bay. 

Maybe, if King were one day allowed to ascend through that pass, he would get his chance to see that the former of those two options had actually occurred. ([url=https://imgur.com/0Lm3ANi]Map[/url])