We watched a man get yanked from an old stilt house. He was a tall fella with red hair, and two of Boss Authority’s men flung him into their boat, facedown while his wife and child hollered on, crying.

“What did he do?” I said.

“Looks like Boss Authority’s rounding up anyone he thinks might be an enemy,” said the priest. “This is the fifth anniversary of your daddy’s defeat, is it not? This is his hour, unless your pop steps up and does something.”

The man in the boat tried to stand, and Boss Authority’s men whomped him in the head with a club. He went slack, groaning from the floor of the boat.

The priest started singing then, a sweet high lovely song like it came out of a mountain, a cold song like the wind blew it straight down from a snow-covered peak, another song of hope and mourning. It wasn’t a swamp song at all, no sir, it wasn’t born in these parts, and you knew it had traveled a long way to get here. Boss Authority’s men paused from beating the fella in the boat and they perked up to listen, watching us pass in the priest-poled skiff, his song soft as fog among the waters. It was as if he stilled the moment, as if all the world had frozen and it was only us in this boat sliding like a lily pad across the water. I wondered if the priest didn’t have some kind of magic to him as well, or if that was just music, what music could do to any heart and mind, so long as the person had ears to hear it.

Where was Pop though? Why wasn’t he doing something to stop all this? Folks were hurting, folks were bound up and arrested, and anyone who wasn’t was scared out of their minds. I knew Pop was in the swamp somewhere, I knew he’d escaped from Cecily Bob and Mr. Hugo. Then why wasn’t he out here, fighting Boss Authority’s men? Why hadn’t he challenged Boss Authority to a rematch? Boy, would I love to see that, Pop finally whoop Boss Authority in a Parsnit duel for the ages. I wished he would show already. I wished Tally and me didn’t have to slink through the waters hidden on a crazy man’s boat just to get us to safety. And judging from what the priest said about Marina’s feelings on Parsnit, maybe her place wouldn’t be safe after all, at least not for me, son of Davey Boy Pennington.

Onward the priest poled us, deeper and deeper into the swamp. My leg got a cramp in it, and somehow a mosquito got into the sack. He was right going to town on me, probably drank near a gallon of my blood, but I didn’t dare slap him away. All around us the swamp was alive and humming, a wild, breathing place. I felt like we had been swallowed by some big ol’ beast and we were floating around in its stomach, warm and dark, a whole world down here in the great belly of everything.