After the sailors finished celebrating, they went to work. I don’t know where they found so many chains aboard the Gamemeno. Maybe Tasos sold slaves when other business was slow. Maybe someone had peculiar tastes in bed. If so, his lady friend must have been an octopus. Otherwise, he never would have needed so many. Wherever the sailors found them, they used them.

And once they’d used them, they covered the coffin with so many roses and so much garlic, it looked like a collision between a florist’s and a Lokrian kitchen. The only thing missing was the olive oil. I’m sure the garlic came from the Gamemeno’s galley. The roses? I asked a sailor who spoke some Hassocki.

He looked at me as if I were even dumber than he’d thought, and he’d already pegged me for an idiot. “Thou hast not so much brain as ear-wax, plainly,” he said. “We brought them back from Skilitsi yesternight.”

They knew what they had on board, all right. I remembered the one sailor praying. Did they tell their passengers? It is to laugh. If we lived, all right. If we didn’t, well, Tasos had our fare, too.

Once the coffin was warded, the sailors swarmed into the rigging with higher spirits than I’d ever seen from them. Stagiros stood on the poop deck and whistled up the wind. The sails filled with wind faster than a politician on the stump. The Gamemeno left Skilitsi behind so fast, you almost forgot it was ever there. I’m sure the people who lived there were just as happy to keep it forgotten, too.

Off to the west, islands poked out of the sea. Some of them had little towns and fields and olive groves. You could live out your days in a place like that and never go more than ten miles from where you were born. Some people think that’s a life. Not me, by Eliphalet’s wind-whipped whiskers! Here I was, on a fast ship, heading for my kingdom!

I made the mistake of saying something along those lines to Max. One of his eyebrows acted as if he’d pulled on a string attached to his hairline. “Here you are, on a sneaking smuggler with a vampire’s coffin on the main deck, heading for a place where they’ll either assassinate you because you’re the king or execute you because you’re not.”

Some people haven’t got the right attitude.

I’ve tried explaining that to Max. He has an easier time swallowing cold iron than common sense. Arguing one more time seemed pointless. Instead, I reached up as far as I could, draped my arm around his shoulder, and crooned, “And here you are with me.”

“Well, someone has to do the worrying.” He shook me off like a unicorn whisking away flies.

Some of the islands out there on the blue, blue sea were too small or too dry to keep a town alive. They had goats, and a herdsman or two to keep track of them. You could live out your days in a place like that, too. It would make a hamlet on one of the bigger islands look like Lakedaimon, but you could do it. Not many of your goats would be much smarter than you were.

And some of the islands were just rocks like the one in front of Skilitsi, but farther out to sea. Maybe a tree or bush would find enough soil in a crack to take root. Maybe a pelican or a gull would perch and look out at the sea all around. Maybe the rock would be-a rock, grayish or golden, useless for anything except smashing a ship that didn’t see it soon enough in fog or storm.

Then there were the almost-islands, rocks that would have been islands if only they’d finished their suppers and drunk their milk when they were young instead of running out to play. They can’t quite poke their noses out of the water now, and they resent it. And they get even by using those noses to rip the guts out of ships that try to sail over them.

Thanks to Stagiros, we were going at quite a clip. I hoped Tasos knew exactly where we were. Discovering he didn’t might prove-embarrassing. The Gamemeno made a couple of small swerves. One was around a place where waves boiled even though you couldn’t see anything that would make them do it. The other stretch of sea looked ordinary enough, but he dodged it anyway. We didn’t hit anything. I approved of not hitting anything.

The wind of our passage ruffled my hair. I patted it back into place. As I did, I glanced back toward the coffin. If that wind was making my hair blow, what was it doing to the roses and garlic that helped hold the vampire inside? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t doing anything. The sailors had thought of that before I did. They’d stuck the stems and the strung-together cloves through the links of the chain. The wards against the vampire weren’t going anywhere at all.

Which I couldn’t say about us. The Gamemeno was as unsavory a ship as ever soiled the sea, but she didn’t waste any time. Whatever Tasos was paying Stagiros, he got his money’s worth. We hustled along. We would have hustled faster yet if we hadn’t stopped at small islands and in little hidden coves to unload this and take on that. Most of the time, I couldn’t tell what this and that were. Once, though, that was a pair of veritable Klephts.

Lokrians sing songs about Klephts. They think they’re romantic heroes-the ones who’ve never run into them, that is. Klepht means thief in Lokrian, which tells you more than you wanted to know about what Lokris is like. These two looked the part. They had fierce, hawklike faces-lines somewhat blurred by bushy beards-and wore big knives in their belts and bandoleers of crossbow quarrels crisscrossing their chests. I didn’t care to quarrel with them, with crossbows or without, even if they also had on those silly little skirts Lokrian men wear instead of pants.

They didn’t seem to want any part of us, either. That didn’t break my heart. Max’s sword could have had their cutlery for breakfast and still been hungry for spoons, which probably had a little something-just a little, mind you-to do with their restraint. They edged warily around the vampire’s coffin. They knew what it was, and they didn’t like it a bit. I wondered what they’d done to need to go somewhere else in such a tearing hurry.

Better not to know, maybe.

We’d just left the little inlet where we picked them up when a lookout screamed most sincerely and pointed out to sea. My gaze followed his finger. I felt like screaming, too. I’d never seen-I’d never imagined-a sea serpent that big.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We have sea serpents in the Suebic Gulf, too. But the northern seas, the seas I grew up with, are cold. That stunts the serpents’ growth. They’ll eat the occasional fisherman, sure, but they hardly ever eat his boat, too.

This one…Well, I’ve spent a lot of time down in southern climes. Who wouldn’t, once he finds out it doesn’t have to be cold and nasty and miserable half the year? In Schlepsig, most people don’t believe snow can come as a surprise. Poor bastards. I’ve spent a lot of time in southern climes, like I say, and I’ve crossed the Middle Sea often enough and then some. I know the nice, warm water grows nice, big (well, big-they aren’t nice) sea serpents. But there’s big, and then there’s big.

And then there was this one.

When it stuck its head out of the water, the tip of its snout was up about as far as the top of the Gamemeno’s mainmast. Now, the smuggler wasn’t the biggest ship in the world, and that mainmast wasn’t one of the tall firs or spruces that do mainmast duty for all the men-of-war in the world. Neverthenonetheless…If that much sea serpent was above the water, think how much had to be below to hold it up.

I did, and I got seasick, or near enough.

Tasos turned green as an unripe olive, so I have to believe he was making the same unhappy calculation. He said something to Stagiros. The weatherworker was minding his own business, which was making the Gamemeno go as if somebody’d goosed her. I don’t even think he noticed the sea serpent till Tasos told him about it.