“If you want someone to tell you what to think,” the phantom answered briskly, without looking up, “you will never be short of people willing to do so.” There. She had it at long last, his voice and manner exactly. Quillam Mye paused to polish his pince-nez, and then squinted at his daughter through them for a long while, as if mildly surprised that she had grown up so much while his attention was elsewhere. “Come now,” he said at last, “you can hardly claim that I have left you ignorant. I taught you to read, did I not?”

V Is for Verdict

V
IS FOR VERDICT

As Mosca found out later, the distant booming she had heard reverberating between the hills was not a buzzing in her stricken eardrums. It was cannon fire.

On receiving Toke’s warning, the Watermen had sent all available boats downstream in two flotillas, one made of swift-skimming vessels, the other of larger, slower vessels, to intercept the ship carrying Lady Tamarind’s troops.

In the short term this meant that a boatload of highly disgruntled Locksmith troops, who had been trying to act upon the orders of their guildmaster in Mandelion to reach the city with all speed, were finally able to sail on without being stopped at every bend in the river by good-natured Watermen who insisted on “searching the boat for Captain Blythe.” They reached Mandelion, and found the city in a state of celebratory riot. Disembarking, they were mistaken for reinforcements of the Duke’s men, overwhelmed by the jubilant crowd, and stripped of their weapons and clothes.

The fast Watermen flotilla, meanwhile, reached Fainbless before the moon rose. There was barely time to put men ashore on the bank and a midriver island before a solitary ship was spied, a three-masted lugger with eight cannon. She flew no colors.

From a tower in Fainbless, the Watermen hailed the unknown ship, waving brands to signal her to shore. Their only answer was an echo and the crack of gunfire.

Three Watermen were lost as the tower collapsed, and their comrades were not slow to touch off their cannon. The crew of the strange ship knew nothing of the Watermen hidden on the island until a flaming “carcass” arc’d from among the trees and landed middeck.

The little Watermen boats flitted and slipped around the great ship like dogs at a baiting, but her muskets and riflemen were too numerous to risk a close approach. Even at long range her cannon ripped their sails.

Just as it seemed that nothing could be done to stop her passing out of range of the Fainbless cannon, the second Watermen flotilla arrived. In desperation a boat was fired and the flaming vessel sent toward the lugger, which steered wildly from its path and grounded itself in unsuspected shallows.