I curled up, hugging my belly, trying to take big breaths of the cold clear air. “Oh, yes, there’s a lot I could tell you. But if you’re going to drop me overboard anyway, I’ve nothing to lose, have I? I might as well keep the rest of my information to myself—or see if Ambrosius will pay for it. And there’s your ship. Look; if you can’t see it yet, you must be blind. Now don’t talk to me any more, I feel sick.”

I heard him laugh again under his breath. “You’re a cool one, and no mistake. Aye, there’s the ship, I can see her clearly enough now. Well, seeing who you are, we’ll take you aboard. And I’ll tell you the other reason; I liked what you said about your friend. That sounded true enough. So you can be loyal, eh? And you’ve no call to be loyal to Camlach, by all accounts, or to Vortigern. Could you be loyal to Ambrosius?”

“I’ll know when I see him.”

His fist sent me sprawling to the bottom of the boat. “Princeling or not, keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak of him. There’s many a hundred men think of him as their King, rightwise born.”

I picked myself up, retching. A low hail came from near at hand, and in a moment we were rocking in the deeper shadow of the ship.

“If he’s a man, that’ll be enough,” I said.

*   *   *

The ship was small, compact and low in the water. She lay there, unlighted, a shadow on the dark sea. I could just see the rake of her mast swaying—sickeningly, it seemed to me—against the scudding cloud that was only a little lighter than the black sky above. She was rigged like the merchantmen who traded in and out of Maridunum in the sailing weather, but I thought she looked cleaner built, and faster.

Marric answered the hail, then a rope snaked down overside, and Hanno caught it and made it fast.

“Come on, you, get moving. You can climb, can’t you?”

Somehow, I got to my feet in the swinging coracle. The rope was wet, and jerked in my hands. From above an urgent voice came: “Hurry, will you? We’ll be lucky if we get back at all, with the weather that’s coming up.”