Meanwhile the pursuit of Silverfin unfolded slowly. Though the disparity in speed between the two vessels was obvious, Silverfin had been given a decent head start by Corvus’s warning, and even Beedles could only row for so long at top speed. Mard and Prim frequently lost view of one or both vessels as their descent took them into various gullies and chutes. The two of them descended faster, and the pursuit at sea went slower, than they had feared. Presently they found themselves on a ledge just above the cove. There they stopped for a few minutes to watch the culmination of the chase. From here details could not be made out. But Mard had explained how galleys were equipped with grappling hooks and spiked, hinged bridges that could be dropped onto the decks of vessels they wished to board. They clearly saw the two ships come together and merge into a single dark knot on the water, some miles out. From that point forward, they could do little more than imagine what might be happening to Fern and her crew as armed Beedles poured across those boarding ramps. Invisible at this distance, but presumably there, must have been Corvus, high enough to be out of the range of Beedles’ arrows. Perhaps later they would hear the melancholy tale from him. In the meantime it behooved them to fetch the casks of drinking water and other valuables they had left on the shore, and move those inland. For if those Beedles had gone to the trouble of following them this far, it stood to reason they might come ashore and hunt around for any stragglers.

That was what they were now. Stragglers. Prim remembered some of the grimmer parts of Querc’s story. She hoped Querc was still down beneath the Overstrike, not seeing any of this.

“A sail. It is definitely a sail!” Mard announced, just as Prim was turning her attention to the last phase of the descent. He’d mentioned it previously, but with less confidence. Prim looked out and thought she could see a white triangle bobbing up and down on swells.

“Do you know what they did?” Mard asked. It seemed a rhetorical question and so Prim just waited. “Fern saw it was hopeless and so gave Silverfin up as a decoy. The Beedles boarded the keelsloop, yes. But Fern’s in the longboat. They’ve raised sail. They are putting some distance between them and the galley.”

“Don’t the Beedles have a longboat of their own?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it would have no advantage in speed. In a sailing contest, my money’s on Fern.”