Halfway into the inner ward, his elation and his energy deserted him. Suddenly the sword on his hip was a grinding spit of iron, and the armour was a prison, and every muscle in his back and shoulders whined and moaned or screamed in agony. He paused, and for a moment he considered simply sitting under the wall and going to sleep.

Sleep.

He looked up the hill of the great fortress’s interior from the main gate. But the palazzo was dark – even the cressets at the doors were extinguished.

He turned and began to walk down the cobbles to the gatehouse. It suddenly seemed very far, and he felt very foolish. In fact, he laughed aloud.

His feet were loud on the stones.

He emerged from the gatehouse and turned to look at the aristocrats and their party, but they weren’t people he knew – he saw one older man from the festival at the palace, but the others were strangers – and he couldn’t very well ask whether they’d seen a princess of the blood wandering loose.

‘Christ, I’m a fool,’ he said, and started down the road.

As soon as he heard the footsteps behind him, he thought of Drappierro’s warning – that he had people on Lesvos. He whirled, the German long sword coming silkily out of its scabbard.

Princess Theodora stood behind him. Her face was clear in the moonlight.

‘I followed your laugh,’ she said. ‘I hear you are a fool.’ She raised an arched eyebrow. ‘The sword is, I promise you, unnecessary.’

‘Who says I am a fool?’ Swan asked, his heart beating harder than it had in the sea fight.

‘An expert,’ she said. She came close to him – so close that suddenly her eyes were alive in the moonlight and he could feel the heat of her body. She paused and put a hand on his arm. ‘You stink, Englishman.’

Swan laughed. ‘There were fish,’ he said. Which was suddenly a very funny thing to say.

She nodded. ‘I’d say there was also blood, and worse,’ she said. ‘I happen to know where there is a great deal of water.’ She raised her face, and her lips brushed his, and then she was away into the darkness.

‘That’s all I dare,’ she said. ‘I’d hate to be overwhelmed, and faint.’

Fatigue forgotten, he chased her into the darkness.

In the morning, the Katherine Sturmy weighed anchor and sailed away, north and west. And the order’s fleet rowed out of the harbour, and turned south, towards Chios. A Thames wherry was roped down amidships on the Blessed Saint John’s deck, and Swan stood by the helmsman, bleary-eyed with fatigue.

Just before the bells would have struck for nones, with Mytilini almost lost in the day-haze behind them and Mount Olympos plain as day on their starboard side, Fra Tommaso sent for Swan in the aft cabin.

‘I’m guessing you had mass this morning,’ Fra Tommaso said.

Swan nodded soberly. He had left Princess Theodora by a postern gate that opened – magically – without a knock, and had proceeded, carrying his breastplate, to the grotto church, where he’d heard mass in the pre-dawn darkness. He wasn’t sure whether he’d had any sleep or not. It was all like a dream.

‘You’ll still go through with this?’ Tommaso asked. His voice was dry. He was very much the same as he had been in their first days together. He handed Swan a glass of sweet wine. ‘Listen, lad. You are a passable liar and a fine sword, and with a little humility, you might make a man. If you do this – the odds are you’ll die hard, and for nothing.’

Swan frowned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ Some time in the darkness, instead of mumbling endearments, she had said my world is ending. He had promised her. She had also told him not to trust Zambale. What could possibly be wrong with Zambale?

What’s wrong with me? Swan thought. Tommaso was offering him a way out, and he was eager to go.

Tommaso narrowed his eyes. ‘Let me try this another way,’ he said. ‘I’d far rather that you sailed away now – or had left last night with the Sturmys – than that you went to Chios and … betrayed us.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’

Swan shook his head. ‘Don’t be, my lord.’ He smiled, and glanced at the ring on his finger, the crystalline head of Athena sparkling in the sun. ‘You and Domenico read me aright.’ He shrugged. ‘It is hard to explain. But I think – I think that I cannot betray you.’ He flashed the ring. ‘Besides, I’m invincible.’

Tommaso rose and crushed him in an embrace. ‘Well, boy, you are my kind of fool, and no mistake. If you live – I’ll see that your patents of nobility pass the chapter, even if they’re as false as a tartar’s heart.’

While Tommaso embraced him, he dropped the order’s command seal back on the man’s sea table.

Then Swan bowed deeply. ‘I think I’d make a very poor knight,’ he said. ‘But I promise that if I survive this, I’ll always be at the order’s service.’

Ten minutes later, the wherry was over the side, and he had the little sail up, and was skimming the waves like a boy on the Thames, headed south. At his feet was a bundle of Turkish clothes, stripped from a corpse on the beach – there had been a selection on the small tide. When he was well clear of the Christian fleet, he stripped and went over the side with a painter around his waist and a lead-weighted keg – just a small keg, the kind in which men shipped valuable cargoes of alum or such. He went under his own hull twice, and then surfaced, and almost ruined his plan by being so tired he had trouble getting back aboard.

But he finally got a leg over the gunwale, and as he rolled back aboard, he saw the order’s galleys under full sail, line astern, obviously making for the Bay of Kalloni. And to the south, he could see the pickets of the Turkish fleet. Fra Domenico had wanted the Turks to see the order sail into the Bay of Kalloni.

At the last command meeting, he’d smiled – wryly – at the knights, and Richard Sturmy. ‘We do not have to win,’ he said. ‘We do not have to provide a massed Christian fleet. We only have to sow doubt. Doubt is our greatest ally. The Turks think their traitor sent the Genoese Grand Fleet away.’ Domenico had paused. ‘What if Domenico is not a traitor? Omar Reis has to consider that.’

Nor had Swan wasted his writing time solely writing to his mother.

He concealed the forged letter to Messire Drappierro very carefully behind the wherry’s backboard – a location every London boy knew. He hoped that Turks knew the trick too, because he wanted the letter to be found.

Drappierro thought he was so very smart.

Whistling, Swan got the sail back up, picked up speed, and put the bow south again.

To Chios.

The only problem with Swan’s plan was that it depended on several people behaving in predictable ways, and Swan knew that at any point, he could simply be killed. Some parts of the plan would then continue to function, but – despite the order’s teachings – Swan wasn’t very interested in the functioning of his plan after his own death.

And what if they haul the boat out of the water? he asked himself. What if they haven’t landed their oarsmen?

He thought of a hundred flaws.

He landed with the dawn on the northern tip of Chios and saw the Temple to Zeus as the sun crossed the mountains and kissed the still-standing columns. He lay on the warm marble and slept – all day. He awoke to watch half the Turkish fleet sailing away on a long reach west, probably headed for the entrance of the Bay of Kalloni, and he grinned at the ring and the head of Athena on his hand and thought of Fra Domenico.

Then he worried that Auntie’s galley was heading south.

Eventually, he decided that it was, truly, out of his hands, and he went back to sleep.

As darkness fell, he woke, and swam off the east pediment of the temple, in what might have been the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And then dried himself, and put on the dead man’s clothes, tied his turban, and launched his boat.