Only a dream! Zoria be praised! Barrick is still alive, then-I would know it if he wasn't, I'm sure of it. But although the rest of the terrible fancy had melted like fog, the rasping of labored breath hadn't. She turned to find Shaso dan-Heza slumped over in the boat behind her, eyes closed, teeth clenched so that they gleamed with reflected starlight in his shadowed face. Air scraped slowly in and out; the old Tuani warrior sounded near death.

"Shaso? Can you talk to me?" When he did not reply, Briony grabbed at the thin, hard shoulder of the Skimmer girl. "He's ill, curse you! Can't you hear him?"

"Of course I can hear him, my lady." The girl's voice was surprisingly hard. "Do you think I am deaf?"

"Do something! He's dying!"

"What do you want me to do, Princess Briony? I cleaned and bound his wounds before we left my father's house, and gave him good tangle-herb for physick, but he is still fevered. He needs rest and a warm fire, and even then it may not do him any good."

"Then we need to get ashore! How far to the Marrinswalk coast?"

"Half the night more, my lady, at the best. That is why I have turned back."

"Turned back? Have you lost your mind? We are fleeing assassins! The castle is held by my enemies now."

"Yes, enemies who will hear you if you shout too loudly, my lady."

Briony could barely make out the face beneath the hooded cloak, but she didn't need to see to know she was being mocked. Still, Ena was right in at least one thing: "All right, I'll talk more quietly-and you will speak to the point! What are you doing? We cannot go to the castle. Shaso will

die there more surely than if we were to push him into the water this mo¬ment. And I'll be killed, too."

"I know, my lady. I did not say I was going to take you back to the cas¬tle, I only said I had turned back. We need shelter and a fire as soon as pos¬sible. 1 am taking you to a place in the bay to the east of the castle-Skean Egye- Var my people call it-'Erivor's Shoulder' in your tongue."

"Erivor's Shoulder? There is no such place…!"

"There is, and there is a house upon it-your family's house."

"There is no such place!" For a moment Briony, faced with Shaso dying in her arms, was so full of rage and terror that she almost hit the girl. Then she suddenly understood. "M'Helan's Rock! You mean the lodge on M'Helan's Rock."

"Yes. And there it is." The Skimmer girl stilled her oars and pointed at a dark bulk on the near horizon. "Praise the Deep Ones, it looks empty."

"It ought to be-we did not use it this summer, with Father away and all else that has happened. Can you land there?"

"Yes, if you'll let me think about what I am doing, my lady. The currents are sharp at this hour of the night, just before morning."

Briony fell into anxious silence while the Skimmer girl, moving her oars as deftly as if they were an extension of her own arms, directed the pitch¬ing boat in a maddeningly slow circle around the island, searching for the inlet between the rocks.

Always before Briony had come to the island on the royal barge, stand¬ing at the rail far above the water as the king's sailors leaped smartly from place to place to make sure the passage would be smooth, and so she had never realized just how difficult a landing it was. Now, with the rocks loom¬ing over her head like giants and the waves lifting and dropping Ena's little craft as though it were a bit of froth in a sloshing bucket, she found herself hanging on in silent dread, one hand clamped on the railing, the other clutching a fold of the thick, plain shirt the Skimmers had given Shaso, doing her best to keep the old man upright.

Just as it seemed the Skimmer girl had misjudged the rocks, that their boat must be shattered like bird bones in a wolf's jaws, the oars dug hard into the dark water and they slid past a barnacled stone so closely that Briony had to snatch back her hand to save her fingers. The wooden hull scraped ever so briefly, just enough to send a single thrill of vibration through the tiny boat, and then they were past and into the comparatively quiet inlet.

"You did it!"

Ena nodded, studiously calm as she rowed them across the inlet to the floating dock shackled to the rock wall. Just a few yards away, on the ocean side, the waves thumped and roared like a thwarted predator, but here the swell was gentled. When the boat was tied, they dragged Shaso's limp weight out of the boat and managed to haul him up the short ladder and onto the salt-crusted dock where they had to let him drop.

Ena slumped down into a crouch beside Shaso's limp form. "I must rest… just for a bit…" she said, her head sagging.

Briony thought about how hard and how long the Skimmer girl had worked, rowing for hours to get them away from the castle to the safety of this inlet. "I've been ungrateful and rude," she told the girl. "Please forgive me. Without your help, Shaso and I both would have been dead long ago."

Ena said nothing, but nodded. It was possible that, in the depths of her hooded cloak she might have smiled a little, but the night was too dark for Briony to be sure.

"While you two rest, I'm going to go up to the lodge and see what I can find. Stay here." Briony draped her own cloak over Shaso, then climbed the stairway cut into the stone of the inlet wall. It was wide, and even though the worn steps were slippery with spray and the dewy mists of night, it was so familiar that she could have climbed it in her sleep. For the first time she began to feel hopeful. She knew this place well and she knew its comforts. She had been resigned to spending her first exiled night in a cave on a Marrinswalk beach, or sleeping in the undergrowth on the lee side of a sea-cliff-at least here she would find a bed.

The lodge on M'Helan's Rock had been built for one of Briony's an¬cestors, Ealga Flaxen-Hair, by her husband King Aduan-a love-tribute some said; a sort of prison others claimed. Whatever the truth, it was only fading family gossip now, the principals dead for a hundred years or more. In Briony's childhood the Eddons had spent at least a tennight on the is¬land each summer, and sometimes much longer than that. Her father Olin had liked the seclusion and quiet of the place, and that he could keep a much smaller court there, often bringing only Avin Brone for counsel, a dozen or so servants, and a skeleton force of guards. As children, Briony and Barrick had discovered a slender, difficult hillside path down to a sea-meadow (as many other royal offspring had doubtless done before them) and had loved having a place where they could often spend an entire af¬ternoon on their own, without guards or any other adults at all. To children who spent nearly every moment of their lives surrounded by servants and soldiers and courtiers, the sea-meadow was a paradise and the summer lodge a place of almost entirely happy memories.

Briony found it very strange to be walking up the front steps alone under the stars. The familiar house, which should be spilling welcoming light from each window, was so deep in darkness she could scarcely make out its shape against the sky. As with so much else this year, and especially these last weeks, here was another treasured part of her life turned higgle-piggle, another memory stolen and mishandled by the Eddon family's enemies.

The memory of Hendon Tolly's mocking face came to her with a stab of cold fury, his amusement at her helplessness as he told her how he was going to steal her family's throne. You may not be the only one responsible for what's happened to our family, you Summerfield scum, but you're the one I know, the one I can reach. In that moment she felt as chill and hard as the stones of the bay. Not tonight-but someday. And when that day comes, I'll take the heart out of you the way you've taken mine. Only yours won't be beating when I'm done.