When they put in to shore to replenish the windjammer’s tanks with water collected from freshets that tumbled from steep cliffs, Gentle and Teal fossicked in the windblown heath on the clifftops and returned with two bucketfuls of silverweed roots which Teal boiled up and mashed with fishgrease into a porridge and insisted that everyone eat a portion because it was rich with vital nutriments absent from their supply of canned and dried food. Although she was trying her best to make herself useful, had taken charge of the cooking and mixed up an ointment to protect Gentle’s unpigmented hide from the brutal sunlight, she was somewhat subdued and withdrawn, having been forced to abandon her work and her home for no other reason than to escape the reckoning for giving aid to Pilgrim and Gentle. She’d had to turn her pet washcat loose, too, and fretted that it would not survive long in the wild. Pilgrim sympathised, having suffered his own losses, and although Teal insisted that her sacrifices had been necessary, he felt a heavy mix of guilt and obligation. A pressure to succeed when success, and how to measure it, were far from certain.