Just when I might have managed to sleep for half an hour, there was a soft knock, and then Mattice drew aside the curtain that shielded our quarters, making enough of a gap for his big beardy face to loom into my vision and say: ‘Morning watch. There’s hot tea in the galley, hot water in the washroom. You’ll feel like death now but we’ve all had our first night on a ship and it gets better.’

‘How many nights does it take?’ Adrana asked.

‘Oh, not many. Sometimes as few as twenty.’

‘Thank you, Mattice,’ I said, shivering despite all the layers I’d pulled around myself in the night.

‘Take your time. But not too much of it if you want to see the sails run out. Hirtshal’s already begun.’

Running out the sails got everyone twitchy. Hirtshal was the master of sail, the man in charge of them, but if something went badly wrong at this stage, half the crew would need to go out in suits to untangle the mess.

‘We run a tight crew,’ Rackamore told me, while we were gathered at the hemispherical window, watching the sail-control gear swing out from the hull. ‘That’s not just because a light ship is a fast ship. It means we don’t have to split our profits too many ways.’

‘I want to learn what I can,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘That’s a fine attitude. And you will – within reason. Knowing how to wear a suit, operate an airlock, find your way around the outside of the ship – that’s basic survival abilities. And some knowledge of the other areas of expertise is always useful. You’ll want to know a little about baubles, a little about relics, and so on, if only because it’ll give you a healthy respect for what you don’t know.’ His jaw tensed. ‘But I have to draw a different line with my Bone Readers. You’re scarce . . . too scarce to expose to the risks that the other crew members naturally accept.’

Prozor, next to us, said: ‘What he means is, girlies, you’re goin’ to be pampered, so get used to it.’

Beyond the glass, the barbs that had been folded along the Monetta’s hull were angling out, just as if that bad-tempered fish were stiffening its spines in some defensive reaction. These were the anchor points for the rigging, the whiskery filaments that linked the ship to her sails. Under Hirtshal’s supervision, they’d be tugged and released all the while, making up for tiny shifts in the solar flux and accommodating the changes in our course that Rackamore had in mind.