Alfred rolled his eyes at her teasing boast. Was she seriously trying to outdo him in terms of the most remote place she'd traveled to? He'd wandered the uncharted wilderness in South America for a year before finding any people at all, and the people he found first were cannibals — and the ones after that killed anyone with any trace of magic on sight. The odds that she'd been there were fairly slim — particularly given that she was so much younger than him. He didn't know exactly how old she was or how long she'd been traveling, but even if she'd been going out of her way to go off the beaten path at every opportunity, it didn't seem possible that she'd actually come anywhere close to covering as much ground as he had in more than fifteen years of travel.

"An expedition to the Southern Sea," he joked dryly. "But you're not going to guess."

With that, he finished undoing the buttons and peeled his shirt away, revealing the network of interconnected tattoos stretching from one shoulder to the other across his chest. Every mark had a story behind it, because that was how the tribal system worked — this was a way of keeping track of a person's life, and all of the important things they did during it. During a funeral, the tattoos would be read back to the people of the village as a final biography before the body was burned.