I thought about it for a few seconds. I didn’t mean to be hard or callous about it. But if he knew we were alive, and not coming to any harm, that was enough.

‘Tell him nothing’s changed,’ I said.

It was the sixth day before something came through the bones again. Adrana got more than a fragment this time. She was hearing a dialogue, two parties whispering to each other, and she babbled out as much of it as she could get her tongue around.

‘. . . hauling in to Mulgracen and needing yardage. Damage to fore- and mid-sun-gallants, possibly repairable . . . advise on costs . . .’ She shook herself out of it, like someone discarding the last tatters of a nightmare. ‘Yardage. What the chaff is yardage?’

‘What the likes of Hirtshal call rigging, when they’re speaking to their own profession,’ Cazaray said. ‘And sun-gallants are a type of sail. Unless you picked that up since you came aboard, you could only have heard it from the skull.’ He shook his head, equal parts wonder, admiration and – I suppose – relief. ‘I never doubted you,’ he said. ‘But I wondered how long it might take. You’re weeks ahead of me!’

‘Let me try, on the same node,’ I said.

Nothing came through that day for me, or the next. But on the eighth day of our instruction, during the morning session, that cold window opened in my head as well. I didn’t get a conversation, not even one word I could sing back to Cazaray. But I’d felt something creep inside my head, something shivery and wrong that didn’t have any business being there, and it wasn’t any kind of feeling I’d ever had before in my life.

I told Cazaray. He closed his eyes, as if a prayer had been granted.

‘There’s much still to be done,’ he said. ‘But I don’t doubt that the captain’s found his new Bone Readers. You’re going to change the fortunes of this ship, both of you.’

‘Do they need changing?’ Adrana asked, hanging the bridges back up on the wall.

‘Lately they haven’t been at all bad, it’s fair to say. But they can always be bettered.’

‘There’s something I wanted to ask,’ I said, fussing my hair back into shape. ‘I heard the captain mention something about the Fang, and then he told me that he used to have a daughter, only he lost her in a stern-chase. Were they the same thing?’

Cazaray took a moment to answer. It was like we were asking him to speak of something against his nature and better judgement, some dark business that was better off not being mentioned.

‘No,’ he said carefully, in a low voice. ‘The Fang was one thing and the stern-chase another. The Fang’s a bauble. It’s where we lost Githlow . . .’

I slid a pin into my hair.

‘Githlow?’