Oh, Auntie, I will give you such a hug when I come back, it will almost crack your bones! And I’ll kiss your old cheeks pink! You will be so astonished! The duchess would cry of course—she always did for happy things, scarcely ever for sad. And you’ll be so proud of me. “You wise girl,” you’ll say to me. “Just what your father would have done. And so brave…!”

Briony nodded and drowsed, thinking about that day to come, so easy to imagine in every way except how it might actually come to pass.

They reached the hilly north Marrinswalk coast just as the rising sun warmed the storm clouds from black to bruised gray, rowing across the empty cove to within a few yards of the shore. Briony bunched the homespun skirt Ena had given her around her thighs and helped the Skimmer girl guide the hull up onto the wet sand. The wind was stingingly cold, the saltgrass and beach heather along the dunes rippling as if in imitation of the shallow wavelets frothing on the bay.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Shaso wrung water out of his saggy clothes. Just as Briony had been clothed in Ena’s spares, he wore one of Turley’s baggy, salt-bleached shirts and a pair of the Skimmer’s plain, knee-length breeches. As he surveyed the surrounding hills, his leathery, wrinkled face gaunt from his long imprisonment, Shaso dan-Heza looked like some ancient spirit dressed in a child’s castoff clothing. “Somewhere not far from Kinemarket, I’d say, about three or four days’ walk from Oscastle.”

“Kinemarket is that way.” Ena pointed east. “On the far side of these hills, south of the coast road. You could be there before the sun lifts over the top.”

“Only if we start walking,” said Shaso.

“What on earth will we do in Kinemarket?” Briony had never been there, but knew it was a small town with a yearly fair that paid a decent amount of revenue to the throne. She also dimly remembered that some river passed through it or near it. In any case, it might as well have been named Tiny or Unimportant as far as she was concerned just now. “There’s nothing there!”

“Except food—and we will need some of that, don’t you think?” said Shaso. “We cannot travel without eating and I am not so well-honed in my skills that I can trap or kill dinner for us. Not until I mend a bit and find my legs, anyway.”

“Where are we going after that?”

“Toward Oscastle.”

“Why?”

“Enough questions.” He gave her a look that would have made most people quail, but Briony was not so easily put off.

“You said you would make the choices, and I agreed. I never said that I wouldn’t ask why, and you never said you wouldn’t answer.”

He growled under his breath. “Try your questions again when the road is under our feet.” He turned to Ena. “Give your father my thanks, girl.”

“Her father didn’t row us.” Briony was still shamed that she had argued with the young woman about landing at M’Helan’s Rock. “I owe you a kindness,” she told the girl with as much queenly graciousness as she could muster. “I won’t forget.”