“Could the galley not just disentangle itself from Silverfin and swoop down on them?” Prim hated to keep asking questions in such a negative vein, but she was having some difficulty understanding why Mard was so very pleased by this turn of events. She began to descend the last few hundred yards toward the cove. After a bit, he followed her. “I suppose it depends on which they want more: the vessel, or the crew,” he answered.

Prim chose not to answer out loud: They have both. They can simply camp out on the shore and wait for us to run out of drinking water. And when Fern and her crew join us, that will only happen all the sooner.

She was too optimistic, as it turned out. The Beedles were not content merely to wait on the shore. They sent hunting parties inland.

The way it went the rest of that day was that Mardellian and Prim, after a brief water break on the shore, began moving the casks of water, and such weapons as they had, inland—which meant uphill. Lyne showed up and helped. He let them know that Querc was still looking after the rope beneath the Overstrike and that Pick was still doing whatever he had gone down there to do.

Silverfin’s longboat sailed into the cove and ran up on the beach. In it were Fern, Swab, and Scale. Rett had died en route from an arrow wound. Scale had suffered a crushing injury to one leg when it had got pinched between Silverfin and the galley as they rolled together. He could not climb. They left him down below while they worked on carrying supplies uphill. They had intended to go back down and fetch him later, but at some point they noticed that he had put out to sea again in the longboat—presumably in the hope that he might sail it up the coast to some safe harbor.

They worked all night carrying the goods up to the high camp near the Overstrike. When dawn broke they were not surprised to see the Beedles’ galley anchored in the cove below, and a column of smoke rising from the sea in the distance where they had scuttled Silverfin.

Their hopes—if that was the right term for a prospect so dismal—that they would simply be left alone while they ran out of water were dashed when Swab staggered into camp with an arrow in her back. A lot of squawking and screaming not far distant was suggestive of a Beedle-vs.-giant-talking-raven fight, and soon they had a blind Beedle on their hands—Corvus had seen him shoot Swab, and taken his eyes out.