Tulan just grunted and muttered something about ‘damned natives’.

The launch reached them. Lines were thrown, attached to it. The two climbed up a rope ladder. It was Storval and Galip. Both carried flesh wounds, cuts and slashes.

‘The others?’ Tulan demanded.

Storval just shook his head, still winded, breathing heavily. He dropped two fat skins of water to the deck.

‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d had Kyle with you,’ Reuth told Storval.

The first mate turned on him, his face flushed, enraged, his hand going to the dirk at his side. Tulan slapped the man’s hand aside, grasped Reuth’s arm and dragged him off. ‘You’re supposed to be a smart lad,’ he hissed. ‘So think before you open your damned hole.’

Reuth peered past his uncle to the first mate. ‘Well … it’s true.’ And he walked away.

He leaned on his elbows over the side while Tulan bellowed to get the crew moving for departure. Sailors readied the running rigging. Arms crossed on the railing, he eyed the figures on the shore, who still had not moved. Seeing us off. The Barren Shore, he knew, was one name for this stretch of the northern coast. Fitting. Another name was the Plain of Ghosts.

He decided he did not want to discover whether or not that appellation was accurate.

Some charts he’d studied had included an inlet in the northern coast that led to rivers and a settlement. A fortress named Taken. But on this coast, on these lands of Assail, Reuth decided not to lead the ship to a fortress with the name of Taken. No, not in these lands. He hoped instead that they would find water before then; some unnamed stream or trickle – anything.

Again, while he daydreamed, his thoughts went to Kyle, as they often did. He must have made it to shore – he’d seemed completely confident that he could. And ashore, he must have headed north. If anyone could make it, he could. Perhaps of all of them he would be the only one to succeed.

Wouldn’t that be an irony? And the probable truth, too, given how the gods seemed to relish irony, reversals, and fitting unanticipated rewards for deeds both good and evil. And on that account, Reuth believed they had earned what they had so far received – the very real possibility of an ugly anonymous death on some desolate shore like this.

It had been wrong of them to turn on Whiteblade like that. His uncle should have thought further ahead. Given the dangers, they would have been so much more secure with him among their crew. Reuth did not think much of their chances now. And that was fitting. For he too had known it was wrong, yet he’d shrunk from drawing a blade and standing with his friend.

He was a coward, and he deserved whatever shameful death the gods had set astride the path of his life.