Rack had been a good captain. Trusko wasn’t a bad man, but he couldn’t smooth over the divisions the way Rack had. It made me realise how lucky we’d been.

‘Fura, you’ll be on bone watch whenever you’re sharp enough,’ Trusko said. ‘A word, a rumour, a sniff of a rumour on any of these baubles, I want to know about it. Other ships wanting a bite of our cherries . . .’

‘And if anything else comes up?’ I asked. ‘On other baubles? You’d want to know that, wouldn’t you? Our course ain’t set in stone, is it?’

‘We could,’ Trusko said, in tones that made it plain that such a thing was the height of unlikeliness, as far as he was concerned. ‘But it would have to be exceptional intelligence, and then, of course, Prozor would need to confirm the auguries . . .’

‘No harm in speculating on it,’ Drozna said. ‘But when the Cap’s set on a plan, it takes a lot to budge him off it.’

Gathing was giving me an odd, careful look, as if he had seen something in me that everyone else had missed. I wondered if I’d gone too far with all that talk of changing course. Prozor’s expression gave nothing away. I suppose it was dicey for the both of us. We could afford a few mistakes, but not too many.

‘I didn’t mean to speak out of turn,’ I said.

‘She’s learning some manners,’ Surt said. ‘There’s hope for her yet.’

We sailed for the first bauble. It was an uneventful four-week crossing, and it barely took us beyond the limit of the outer processionals. For much of that crossing, Prozor and I kept our meetings to snatched words as we passed in a corridor, or the occasional furtive exchange when we were sure that the others were asleep or preoccupied. The bone room would have been a pretty place to talk, especially as none of the other crew were too keen to spend time in it. But if someone had chanced upon Prozor and me in there, bumping our gums like old pals, there’d have been no accounting for it. We couldn’t take that risk, so we didn’t.

Slowly, though, in a word here and a word there, we brought each other up to date on what we knew or had deduced.

Trusko was a fake. That story he’d spun me, of starting off on the bones, was one that the rest of the crew had swallowed as well. But none of it was worth a quoin. He hadn’t spent half the time in space that he wanted us to think, so Prozor reckoned, and I guessed she had spent enough time around honest coves to know the difference.