He touched her face. “We dropped whoever it was over the side of the Skatelow as she was rising. We tricked it off, and it was trying to get back aboard, but we managed to cut the ladder loose as it was climbing up. I think it might be dead.”

She shook her head at once, her face rigid with terror. “It isn’t dead. It isn’t. I would know. I would feel it! You haven’t spent three days with it like I did, Penderrin. You haven’t felt it touch you. You haven’t heard that voice. You haven’t been through what I’ve been through. You don’t know!”

He pressed her close again. “Tell me, then. Tell me everything.”

“It made us prisoners. I don’t know how it managed, but I never heard anything. No one even had a chance to struggle. I was locked away below, but I heard everything. It tortured Papa and the others and then it killed them. It took a long time. I could hear them screaming, could hear the sounds of—”

She broke off, gasping. “I’ll never forget. Never. I can still hear it.” Her fingers were digging into Pen’s arms. She took a deep breath. “When it was over, the . . . thing came for me. I thought I was next. But it knew about my sight, about how I could see things in my mind. That was what it wanted. It told me to find you. I was so afraid that I did what I was told because I didn’t want to die. I did everything right up until I found you, and then I turned us another way. I don’t know why. I don’t know how I found the courage. I thought I was dead, then.”

“We saw you lead it away,” Pen whispered. “We knew what you had done. So we came after you.”

“If you hadn’t . . .”

She shuddered once and began to cry again. “I can’t believe Papa is gone.”

Pen thought of Gar Hatch and his cousins hanging from the rigging like scarecrows, food for scavengers. He’dhave to cut them down and dispose of them before she was allowed on deck. Maybe she couldn’t see with her eyes, but she could see in other ways. He didn’t want that to happen.

“Tell me what this is all about,” she whispered. “Please, Pen. I need to know why Papa’s gone.”

Pen told her, starting at the beginning with the disappearance of the Ard Rhys, detailing his own flight west to find Ahren Elessedil and their journey before they had found Gar Hatch and the Skatelow. He told her how he had come to be in this situation, what he was expected to do and why, and where they were heading now. He confided his doubts and fears to her, admitted his sense of inadequacy, and revealed his reasons for continuing on nevertheless. As he spoke, she stopped shaking and grew quiet in his arms. Her horror of what had happened seemed to drain away, and the calmness he had been awaiting settled over her.