“Then we need to get ashore! How far to the Marrinswalk coast?”

“Half the night more, my lady, at the best. That is why I have turned back.”

“Turned back? Have you lost your mind? We are fleeing assassins! The castle is held by my enemies now.”

“Yes, enemies who will hear you if you shout too loudly, my lady.”

Briony could barely make out the face beneath the hooded cloak, but she didn’t need to see to know she was being mocked. Still, Ena was right in at least one thing: “All right, I’ll talk more quietly—and you will speak to the point! What are you doing? We cannot go to the castle. Shaso will die there more surely than if we were to push him into the water this moment. And I’ll be killed, too.”

“I know, my lady. I did not say I was going to take you back to the castle, I only said I had turned back. We need shelter and a fire as soon as possible. I am taking you to a place in the bay to the east of the castle—Skean Egye-Var my people call it—‘Erivor’s Shoulder’ in your tongue.”

“Erivor’s Shoulder? There is no such place…!”

“There is, and there is a house upon it—your family’s house.”

“There is no such place!” For a moment Briony, faced with Shaso dying in her arms, was so full of rage and terror that she almost hit the girl. Then she suddenly understood. “M’Helan’s Rock! You mean the lodge on M’Helan’s Rock.”

“Yes. And there it is.” The Skimmer girl stilled her oars and pointed at a dark bulk on the near horizon. “Praise the Deep Ones, it looks empty.”

“It ought to be—we did not use it this summer, with Father away and all else that has happened. Can you land there?”

“Yes, if you’ll let me think about what I am doing, my lady. The currents are sharp at this hour of the night, just before morning.”

Briony fell into anxious silence while the Skimmer girl, moving her oars as deftly as if they were an extension of her own arms, directed the pitching boat in a maddeningly slow circle around the island, searching for the inlet between the rocks.

Always before Briony had come to the island on the royal barge, standing at the rail far above the water as the king’s sailors leaped smartly from place to place to make sure the passage would be smooth, and so she had never realized just how difficult a landing it was. Now, with the rocks looming over her head like giants and the waves lifting and dropping Ena’s little craft as though it were a bit of froth in a sloshing bucket, she found herself hanging on in silent dread, one hand clamped on the railing, the other clutching a fold of the thick, plain shirt the Skimmers had given Shaso, doing her best to keep the old man upright.

Just as it seemed the Skimmer girl had misjudged the rocks, that their boat must be shattered like bird bones in a wolf’s jaws, the oars dug hard into the dark water and they slid past a barnacled stone so closely that Briony had to snatch back her hand to save her fingers. The wooden hull scraped ever so briefly, just enough to send a single thrill of vibration through the tiny boat, and then they were past and into the comparatively quiet inlet.