Although the Skimmer girl had shown no other signs of paying attention to the bizarre catalogue of events, when she heard Gil’s pronouncements about Barrick, Ena put down her washing and sat up straight. “Porcupine’s eye? He said to beware the Porcupine’s eye?”

“Yes, what of it?”

“The Porcupine-woman is one of the most ill-named of all the Old Ones,” Ena said seriously. “She is death’s companion.”

“What does that mean?” Briony asked. “And how would you know?”

The secretive smile stretched the girl’s wide mouth again, but her eyes did not meet Briony’s. “Even on Skimmer’s Lagoon, we know some important things.”

“Enough,” said Shaso angrily. “I will sleep today—I do not like being a burden. When the sun goes down, we will leave. Girl,” he said to Ena, “take us to the Marrinswalk coast and then your service will be over.”

“As long as you eat something else before we leave,” Ena told him. “More soup—you barely touched what I gave you. I promised my father I would keep you safe, and if you collapse again he will be angry.”

Shaso looked at her as if she might be mocking him. She stared back, unfraid. “Then I will eat,” he said at last.

Briony spent much of the afternoon staring out at the bay, fearful of seeing boats coming toward the island. When she got too cold at last, she went in and warmed herself at the fire.

On her way back to her sentinel perch in the heather, she walked through the lodge—a place that once, because of its small size, had been more familiar to her than Southmarch Castle itself. Even in daylight it now seemed as strange as everything else because of the way the world had changed, all the things which had been so familiar and ordinary transformed in a single night.

Right here, in this room, is where Father told us the story about Hiliometes and the manticore. A tennight ago she would have sworn she could never forget the smallest detail of what it had felt like to huddle in the blankets on their father’s bed and hear the tale of the demigod’s great battle for the first time, yet here she was in the very chamber and suddenly it all seemed vague. Had Kendrick been with them, or had he gone to bed, intent on going out early in the morning with old Nynor to catch fish? Had there been a fire, or had it been one of those rare, truly hot summer nights on M’Helan’s Rock when the servants were told to leave all but the kitchen fire unlit? She couldn’t remember anything but the story, now, and their father’s exaggeratedly solemn, bearded face as he spoke. Would she forget that one day, too? Would all her past vanish this way, bit by bit, like tracks in the dirt pelted by rain?

Briony was startled by a wriggle of movement at the edge of her vision—something moving quickly along the skirting board. A mouse? She moved toward the corner and startled something out from behind a table leg, but before she had a chance to see what it was it had vanished again behind a hanging. It seemed strangely upright for a mouse—could it be a bird, trapped in the house? But birds hopped, didn’t they? She pulled back the wall hanging, strangely apprehensive, but found nothing unusual.