“Very well,” she said, surrendering at last. “You are most kind. I’ll take a candle and leave you the lamp. We have bedding in the chest in the hall—I’ll leave some out for you and for Shaso.”

“He will sleep where he is, I think,” said Ena quietly, perhaps to spare Shaso the shame of being talked about like a child. “He should be comfortable enough.”

“When this is over and the Tollys are rotting on the gibbet, the Eddons will not forget their friends.” The Skimmer girl showed no emotion at this, so Briony tried to make herself clear. “You and your father will be rewarded.”

Now Ena definitely did smile, even looked as though she might be stifling laughter, which confounded Briony utterly, but she only said, “Thank you, Highness. It is my honor to do what I can.”

Puzzled, but too weary to think about it, Briony felt her way to the nearest bedchamber, turned over the dusty bedcover, then stretched out. It was only as sleep dragged her down that she remembered this room had been the one that Kendrick had used.

Come back, then, she told her dead brother, dizzy with exhaustion. Come back and haunt me, dear, dear Kendrick—I miss you so…!

But the sleep into which she fell, tumbling slowly downward like a feather in a well, was impenetrably dark, empty of both dreams and ghosts.

The island was surrounded by fog, but dawn still brought enough light to make the lodge on M’Helan’s Rock a familiar place once more—light that slipped in through the high windows and filled the great hall with a blue-gray glow as soft as the sheen on a pearl and made the statues of the holy onirai in their wall-niches look as if they were stirring into life. Even the kitchen again seemed to be the homely place Briony remembered. Things that she had been too exhausted to notice the night before, the tang of the air, the lonely cries of shearwaters and gulls, the heavy furniture scuffed by generations of Eddon children creating imaginary riding-caravans or fortresses, now made her insides twist with sorrow and longing.

Gone. Every one of them. Barrick, Father, Kendrick. She felt her eyes brim with tears and wiped them angrily. But Barrick and Father are alive—they must be. Don’t be a stupid girl. Not gone, just…somewhere else.

Crouched in the heather at the front of the lodge, she stared long and hard back at the castle. A few torches seemed to be moving on the bay at the base of the castle walls—search boats checking the inlets and caves along the shore of Midlan’s Mount—but none of them seemed to have ventured any farther from Southmarch. Briony felt a gleam of hope. If she herself had forgotten the summer house, there was a chance the Tollys wouldn’t remember until she and Shaso were long gone.

Back in the kitchen she dutifully ate her fish soup, enlivened this time by wild rosemary which Ena had found thriving in the masterless, overgrown garden. Briony could not be certain when she would eat again, and she reminded herself that even fish soup was noble if it would give her the strength to survive so that one day she could drive something sharp through Hendon Tolly’s heart.