“Nevertheless.”

It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.

“Let us return to the Morgan Downs.”

“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”

It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines—something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.

He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.

“What do you think?”

The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.

“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”

“What do you think it was?”

“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”

Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.

“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”

“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”

He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.

“Really?” Quentin said.

“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”

“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”

“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”

“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made us look like we were standing still.”

Quentin nodded. He stood up in the boat. A halo of little birds lifted off from the ship’s blasted hull, stalled for a moment on a puff of wind, and then settled back down again. The smack had come around to the far side, and they could see the deck, which was stove in in at least two places. The ship’s name was painted across the stern: MUNTJAC.