It took fifteen cold, queasy hours to reach Sumburgh Roost, where the North Sea and the Atlantic crash together just off the southern tip of Shetland main isle. Those who had made the crossing many times braced themselves, but eventually every girl on board, even Kitta, was doing exactly what Clementina said: puking whatever was in her stomach. But not me. Aye, I felt the power of the Roost beneath me, flinging my body about like a thing with no weight, but I struggled to the aft railing and held on, my face straight into the blast of the wind. There were moments when the lurching of the ship seemed to fall in with the swilling of my blood, but I clamped my teeth, I wasn’t afraid. I would not be beaten nor brought to my knees by the sea.

At last I could see the flinty grey of something more solid than cloud.

The wide world!

I kiss the air. It spins around me with the rush of something new, something that is white and clean and so real that I can touch it with my fingertips, feel it on my lips, on the skin of my face. It gusts through my hair, pulling it at the roots, and I am breathing it into me, this wondrous something new. And suddenly I know that I will never be the same again because I have felt freedom in my lungs.

2

Lerwick harbour was a mirror of Gadlehead, with its swarming sailors, ships from stranger-ports, holds of fish. As I stepped off the St Rognvald and onto the wharf, a truly wonderful new word I’d read in the Forget-Me-Not Annual came into my head. Cacophony. Such a word to try in your mouth, clicking from the centre, huffing from your teeth to your tongue. Ca-co-pho-ny. And that’s what was all around me. A cacophony of voices and whistles, shouting and haggling, engine roar and the clang-clang of hammers on the hoops of barrels.

Watch your step, Fish Meggie, Kitta called as we followed Clementina to where a man with a pencil and clipboard was checking off names again. Ye’ll screw your head right off your neck if ye don’t take care!