When he could inspect it again he saw that the wound was bleeding but not pumping blood. There seemed to be a sharp limit to how deep a breath he could take without his vision going gray with pain. He tried to think what was in there. From the pain when he moved the sword must have cut muscle, but it couldn’t have reached his lung. Could it? What the hell else was over there? Probably it had just gone into the flank meat.

Adrenaline was flooding his system, dimming the pulsing flare of pain, pulling oxygen away from it. It was there, but he started to be able to bear it. As he did he realized what was happening. It dawned on him with a terrible, fiery power. He was having an adventure. A real one this time. That’s what the pain was.

He looked at his hands. He could feel his left one again. He made fists with both of them. There was a chunky notch in his wooden collarbone, but no deep structural damage. The kind of thing you’d fill in with Bondo. He shook his head. It seemed clear. Or clearish.

He looked at the man snoring facedown on the stubby island grass. He picked up his sword and began walking in the direction the man had come from.

The castle was a small three-part affair: a stodgy boxy keep with two outlying watchtowers, all built out of gray stone, with enormous trees growing around them. The whole layout was visible from where he stood on the rocky hillside. It was built on a grassy knob of land at the foot of the hills that Quentin could now see dominated one coast of the island, screening the castle from other angles of view. No wonder he and the others had missed it.

Quentin crept from rock to rock, keeping out of sight of whoever might be monitoring the hillside, zigzagging downhill toward the castle. He didn’t meet any more soldiers. Maybe it had just been bad luck. Not wanting to push it, he picked his way down a rocky defile to the edge of the sea. He would approach by creeping along the shore.