“You did it!”

Ena nodded, studiously calm as she rowed them across the inlet to the floating dock shackled to the rock wall. Just a few yards away, on the ocean side, the waves thumped and roared like a thwarted predator, but here the swell was gentled. When the boat was tied, they dragged Shaso’s limp weight out of the boat and managed to haul him up the short ladder and onto the salt-crusted dock where they had to let him drop.

Ena slumped down into a crouch beside Shaso’s limp form. “I must rest…just for a bit…” she said, her head sagging.

Briony thought about how hard and how long the Skimmer girl had worked, rowing for hours to get them away from the castle to the safety of this inlet. “I’ve been ungrateful and rude,” she told the girl. “Please forgive me. Without your help, Shaso and I both would have been dead long ago.”

Ena said nothing, but nodded. It was possible that, in the depths of her hooded cloak she might have smiled a little, but the night was too dark for Briony to be sure.

“While you two rest, I’m going to go up to the lodge and see what I can find. Stay here.” Briony draped her own cloak over Shaso, then climbed the stairway cut into the stone of the inlet wall. It was wide, and even though the worn steps were slippery with spray and the dewy mists of night, it was so familiar that she could have climbed it in her sleep. For the first time she began to feel hopeful. She knew this place well and she knew its comforts. She had been resigned to spending her first exiled night in a cave on a Marrinswalk beach, or sleeping in the undergrowth on the lee side of a sea-cliff—at least here she would find a bed.

The lodge on M’Helan’s Rock had been built for one of Briony’s ancestors, Ealga Flaxen-Hair, by her husband King Aduan—a love-tribute some said; a sort of prison others claimed. Whatever the truth, it was only fading family gossip now, the principals dead for a hundred years or more. In Briony’s childhood the Eddons had spent at least a tennight on the island each summer, and sometimes much longer than that. Her father Olin had liked the seclusion and quiet of the place, and that he could keep a much smaller court there, often bringing only Avin Brone for counsel, a dozen or so servants, and a skeleton force of guards. As children, Briony and Barrick had discovered a slender, difficult hillside path down to a sea-meadow (as many other royal offspring had doubtless done before them) and had loved having a place where they could often spend an entire afternoon on their own, without guards or any other adults at all. To children who spent nearly every moment of their lives surrounded by servants and soldiers and courtiers, the sea-meadow was a paradise and the summer lodge a place of almost entirely happy memories.