Fouracres steered the landaulet nimbly through the throng of other vehicles: wheelbarrows, sedan chairs, carts, wagons, coaches and carriages as fine as Europe’s, and some even finer. The smell of the Grume wafted up every south-facing street, brought upon breezes of frosty air. Europe covered her nose and mouth with a gloved hand.

As they went, Fouracres made arrangements. “Now what is to be yer destination here?”

Europe roused herself and spoke first. “I need to attend the offices of Messrs. Ibdy & Adby on the Pontoon Wigh,” she said.

“Very well,” the postman replied politely. “. . . And, Rossamünd—yer mentioned something about Mister Germanicus at the Harbor Gov—”

“You can leave what he does and where he goes to me, postman!” Europe interrupted with a scowl. “You’re my driver and you drive. He is my factotum, and even if only for now, he attends me! When I decide it is time, his needs shall be met. Till then, serve me!”

Rossamünd blinked.

Fouracres scowled in return. “Last I knew, madam, he and most definitely I worked for the Emperor! So till I make a declaration otherwise, yer can keep yer ‘serve me’s’ to yerself. I’m doing yer a favor, and I’ll see it through, but I ain’t yer servant by any more than common decency allows!”

Europe, her eyes slitted and glaring, looked as if she could say more, much more, but then she sagged and returned to her blank stare at the passing scene. “However you want it . . . Just drive, will you?” was all she said.

The postman drove on while Rossamünd intently studied the right toe of his shoe, not daring to look up.

They came to a great square: an enormous paved area cordoned off from traffic and filled with fountains and commemorative columns. At each corner was a massive statue of the Arius Vigilans—the Vigilant Ram—a heavily horned he-sheep in various poses of stout defiance or regal repose. These were the representative animal of Rossamünd’s people the Hergotts, and seeing them so boldly displayed made him feel proud. Glamorous crowds filled the area, their energy and foreign costume a spectacle of its own.

On the opposite side of this grand square was their destination. Messrs. Ibdy & Adby, Mercantile & Supercargo was situated in a lofty building of glossy pink stone. Its front was an almost windowless mass of giant pilasters with an impressive door of dull brown bronze in their midst. Immediately above the door were two columns of windows, as narrow and tall as any other in this city. Rossamünd counted the windows by row. Thirteen! He had never seen such a large structure, but from what he could gather, there were several about High Vesting.

As Fouracres stopped the landaulet in the common courtyard before the office tower of Messrs. Ibdy & Adby, Rossamünd, unable to contain himself any longer, asked eagerly, “May I see the rams? Miss Europe? I might never get to see them ever again.”

Gulls cavorted above. To the south, out over the Grume, great bales of pale yellow cloud boiled and piled up into the sky. Their flattened undersides were a dark and ominous green-gray.

Europe looked at him, then to the postman, who shrugged and said, with a weary smile, “May I suggest this, miss, that I wait here with yer fancy carriage while you do yer dealings and Rossamünd be allowed to have a peek about. Aye?”

With a sigh, Europe pointed to a big clock upon the façade of an equally large building across the square. It was easily visible, and Rossamünd had been taught his timings at the marine society. It was a little after the half hour of two.

“Be back here in one half of an hour, not later,” she allowed, sternly.

“I will! I will!” Rossamünd’s heart raced as he leaped down. About to dash off, he remembered that morning and skittered back, holding out his hand to help Europe alight.

“Well done,” she said, with a wry look. “You’re learning.”

He beamed with joy and hurried off. He had a smile for every person he passed: elegant couples out for a Domesday stroll; stevedores bearing loads; striped-shirted vinegaroons taking shore leave; flamboyantly wigged rams’ captains in gorgeous frock coats doing much the same; important-looking men stuffed into stiff, ludicrously high collars talking on important things beneath feathered and furred thrice-highs. How wonderfully strange it felt to have that little time of liberty in this gorgeously foreign city!

With awe he stepped through the great iron gates that split the mighty seawall and allowed access to the city from the piers and berths. The wall’s foundations were blackened by century-long lapping of the bitter waters of the Grume. All along its lofty summit were batteries of cannon; catapultlike devices called tormentums—for throwing great smoking bombs of the most venomous repellents; and lambasts—machines of war that flung spears dipped in various wicked poisons. As with all coastal cities, High Vesting was in deadly earnest about keeping the cunning monsters of the deep away.

Rossamünd skipped past the seawall and down a long stone pier way. It was intersected by many long, high wooden wharves and lined with many smaller craft, some ironclad, some with hulls of wood. So many vessels were there, with their clutter of tall masts, that walking among them was like moving through a strange forest. Out beyond all this, however, out in the deeper waters of the Mullhaven, were the rams. It was these mighty vessels of war that he wanted to see. It was upon these that he had been expected to serve.

At the end of the pier, moored on a low dock that went out to the right, he discovered a frigate. These were one of the smaller oceangoing rams, with a shallow enough draft to be this close to shore. It was about the length of a monitor, but sat much higher out of the water, so that it could survive the swell of the sea. Fascinated, he happily let his head swell with all the instruction he had received and reading he had done on them. He inspected the single row of ports out of which the cannon would be run, counted each one—twenty-eight in all; he admired the graceful curve of the bow, which gave these warships their name as it ran out and down to the ram; he read the brass nameplate fixed to the fo’c’sle. Surprise, it said. Rossamünd almost swooned. This vessel was famous! It was the fastest of its type in the whole navy, perhaps even the whole world. He had read of it in pamphlets and had even been taught of it at Madam Opera’s. It had served faithfully for over one hundred years!

Then his gaze fixed upon an enormous, dark vessel out in the Mullhaven.

These were the largest of all the rams and this one was absolutely gigantic, dwarfing all the vessels about. Its bow-ram did not jut nearly so far as the frigate’s, for it was thought too big and too slow to successfully charge other vessels. It relied instead on its thick strakes—the iron plates that armored the hull—and the two decks of 120 great-guns that armed either broadside. Rossamünd had always thought this an excellent number of cannon: it meant that for a main-sovereign to fight effectively, she needed a crew of at least fourteen hundred men . . .

“Hello, Rosy Posy!” The cry intruded upon his technical romance.

He knew that voice.

Looking about, quickly he found a face he recognized aboard the Surprise. It was a fellow foundling two years his senior who had shipped off to serve in the navy eighteen months ago. His name was Snarl. He was taller, broader, looked stronger—but it was still Snarl. While at Madam Opera’s, he had been, after Gosling, one of those most active in tormenting Rossamünd.

He looked up at his fellow foundling of old, squinting into the glare of sunlit clouds. “Oh . . . hello, Snarl,” he returned coolly. It should have been an occasion of pride to learn that one of his old bunk-mates was now serving aboard so renowned a ram, but the character of Snarl undid any feelings of such camaraderie.

“Well, well, by and by, it’s ol’ Missy-boots himself, come to see me sitting high on me mighty boat!” Snarl swaggered along the gangway to stand directly above Rossamünd. He called to his fellow crewmen. “Look ’ere, lads, here’s a fellow I grew up with.”

Some of the younger members of the crew looked down upon the foundling standing upon the pier. Some even gave him a genuine grin.

Rossamünd smiled back cautiously.

“As fine a grummet as ever there was, this one, all manners and kindness,” Snarl continued in his high-handed voice. “Got a girl’s name to go with it, haven’t you, Rossamünd?” Snarl had not changed.

Rossamünd turned and walked back up the pier. “Good-bye, Snarl,” he muttered.

He stepped onto a wharf with the brash laughter of the fellow society boy ringing after him. Though he had only been away from his old way of life for less than a fortnight, it already felt like a long time ago. To meet another child from there, rather than bringing it all back, only made this feeling of dislocation stronger. He wondered if Snarl had leaped from the decks of a moving cromster, watched a lahzar in a fight, thrown bothersalts in the face of some grinnlings or dragged an ailing fulgar to a wayhouse. Rossamünd marveled that he had seen and done more in the last two weeks on his own than in two years in the foundlingery.

For a while he wandered about the many smaller craft berthed along either side, taking turns carelessly, trying hard not to brood upon this encounter. He had somehow thought that his fellow foundlings would all grow up once they had left the little world of Madam Opera’s and become a little more sober, a little kinder.

He approached the end of yet another wharf. The clock over the square was still visible through all the masts. Rossamünd checked again as he had several times so far: it was time to return. He went to turn back when a powerful smell briefly overpowered the perfume of the Grume. He knew that stink . . .

A firm hand cunningly pinched the back of his neck. “Well, what’s this ’ere then, an’ ol’ chum returned to the fold?” It was Poundinch. The oily rivermaster loomed over the boy. “Miss us, did ye, Rosey-me-lad?”

Rossamünd went slack and pale with terror, a deep, sinking terror that made him want to vomit.

“Ah, look—’e’s gone all emotion’l at such an ’appy reunion,” purred Poundinch.

Somehow Rossamünd found his tongue. “Ah—ah—hello, Rivermaster P-Poundinch.”

“Hello, Rosey-ol’-boy. I’m called Cap’n Poundinch when I’m in these parts, tho’, so ye’ll need to reschool yer tongue.”

The pressure upon Rossamünd’s neck increased subtly but so skillfully that he was compelled to step forward toward a gangplank before him. There she was, the Hogshead, listing slightly to the aft ladeboard quarter but still very much intact. That was where the oh-so-familiar smell had come from. It would always be the smell of dread for Rossamünd.

“Huh—how did you escape the monitors?” he somehow managed.

“Ah, Rosey-me-lad,” Poundinch purred, tapping his greasy nose with the scarred and grubby forefinger of his free hand, “that’s ol’ Poundy’s way—slipperier than swine’s lard, me . . . Aren’t ye ’appy for me?”

“. . . Um . . .” was all the foundling could offer.

Poundinch pushed him up the gangplank and followed closely behind. Rossamünd thought briefly of leaping into the water, but he had been instructed, over and over, that the caustic waters of the Grume were no place for a person to find himself bobbing about. With that escape route unavailable, he found himself where he thought he would never be again—upon the deck of the Hogshead. Only Gibbon was here, no other crew. He was chewing his black fingernails as he stood by the splintered stump of the tiller.

“Look ’ere, Gibbon, th’ lad couldn’t stay away, ’e missed us so!” Poundinch kept shoving the foundling all the way to the hatchway. Rossamünd pushed against each shove stubbornly.

Gibbon peered dumbly at the foundling for a moment, then his gaze sharpened. “Oh aye, oi rememb’r. ’Ello, boi’o.”

Rossamünd kept his head down. He was too far away, he knew, for Fouracres or Europe to spy him. He reckoned also that at this less-than-salubrious end of the docks other sailors would pay little heed to the subtle struggle taking place aboard the Hogshead.

The hatchway was open, as it usually was, and with that cunning neck-pinch, Poundinch forced the boy to start his way down the ladder. “Just goin’ to finish up an ol’ con-vosation with this’un ’ere,” he called to Gibbon as he himself started down.

Rossamünd descended slowly, his senses reacquainting themselves with the profound lack of light and the overwhelming stench. He could just make out that the hold had been cleared of all its barrels, yet the powerful odor of the swine’s lard had remained, soaked into the very wood of the cromster’s frames and decking—and with it the hint of some far worse fetor. Yet these smells were not all that had been left. A bright-limn hung from a central beam about halfway between the ladder and the bow. It helped little but was enough to show, to Rossamünd’s horror, that the three gruesome crates bound with strong iron smuggled aboard about a week ago were still there. Two of them were side by side near the ladder and one on its own several feet away. This lonely one suddenly shook violently.

Rossamünd gave a tight yelp. He tried to scamper back up, but Poundinch blocked his ascent. The captain shouted at the lonely crate and, after a few shudders more, it became still. The hold was otherwise empty but for acerbic seawater leaking in from the stern end of the hold. Rossamünd saw that it was already about an inch deep at the bottom of the steps.

“Ye knows what’s in these ’ere crates, don’t ye, lad?” Poundinch had stopped about halfway down and cast his hefty shadow over the foundling.

“Uh—I—n-no . . .” Rossamünd spluttered and backed away from both Poundinch and the crates. The bilgewater came up to his ankles now.

“Aw, come now, ye were snoopin’ about, listenin’ and pryin’ after we took ’em aboard. Tryin’ to get somethin’ over ol’ Poundy, were ye? A li’l morsel to sell to ’is enemies, ’ey? A li’l bit o’ lev’rage to make some deals?”

The nature of this rogue’s suspicions revealed, Rossamünd looked at him in disbelief.

Poundinch descended all the way to the bottom. “Those innocent rabbit eyes ye make don’t work on me, mucky little mouse. I think I’ll leave ye down ’ere to think again upon th’ falsities of yer stubborn, lyin’ tongue. We’ll be back to collect them crates in a couple of ’ours, so ye’ll ’ave a bit o’ time to change th’ tune of yer whistle.” He grabbed Rossamünd by the wrist, twisting it cruelly.

Tears started in the foundling’s eyes as he was compelled to squirm and bend in order to lessen the pain, movement which brought him right by two crates. “But I don’t know anything! I don’t know anything! I just want to work as a lamplighter!” Rossamünd howled, over and over.

Captain Poundinch ignored him and instead, quicker than a cat, gathered up Rossamünd’s hands and wound cord roughly all about them, fixing it to a loop of rope that held one of the crates together in such a way that it forced him to sit.

The boy’s heart froze. He had been tied right up against a crate! His mind went a white blank of panic. “But! . . . But! . . .” was all he could manage.

“Aye, ‘but, but.’ Ye’re babblin’ now, bain’t ye? Got to make more sense if ye wants yer freedom, tho’.” Poundinch put his greasy face next to Rossamünd’s. “Ye were sooo keen to know what were in me cargo! Well now ye can ’ave a good ol’ gander, as close as ye could want for,” he growled. “Ye’ve got about three ’ours till I return—plenty of time for ye to mull, and if ye’re still whole enough to speak after such a time with me prettee pieces ’ere, we’ll see what we might do with ye. Ye never know, lad, if ye’re lucky, ye might get to live it large on th’ vinegar waves, with ol’ Poundy as yer ev’r faithful, ev’r vigilant cap’n!”

With that and nothing more Poundinch left, his boots thumping heavily, back up the way he had come. The hatch closed with a clang.

“I just want to be a lamplighter . . . ” the boy sobbed. The seat of his longshanks already soaked in half an inch of water, he sat with his arms on his knees and his face buried in his sleeves. Overwhelmed with bitter hopelessness, Rossamünd wept as he never had in his whole life.

Eventually calm came. He stopped crying and instead he listened. The Hogshead creaked in the tidal movements, the brine in the hold slopped ever so quietly and Rossamünd’s heart thumped, but that was all. He lifted his head and squinted about, his face puffy, stinging. It was very dim, but because of the bright-limn not so dark that the crates could not be distinguished clearly. Though he was overshadowed by the box he was bound to, his eyes adjusted to the weak light that also came from cracks about the hatchway. There was not even the slightest hint of movement from any of the three crates, not even the one that shook so determinedly before. Rossamünd had been making all the noise he liked but still the things they contained had remained still. They must have been empty after all. Eyeing the gaps in the crate next to him, his mind whirled.

He would be missed, surely? Not by Europe, perhaps, but certainly by Fouracres. He’d come to the rescue, Rossamünd was sure of it—Wouldn’t he? . . . Yet doubt took hold, and he could not be certain of anything anymore. He was lost. How would they know where to find him? If Master Fransitart was aware of what had happened to him, he knew his old dormitory master would be furious and shift all obstacles to rescue him. But Master Fransitart did not know—and he was too far away to help. Rossamünd rolled his eyes in his grief and his gaze caught a glimpse of something between the slats of the crate to which he was tied.

Two eyes stared back at him, yellow and inhumanly round.

Rossamünd shrieked like a person touched with madness, and tugged and writhed wildly in his bonds. The crate jerked violently too, and the eyes disappeared. In blind panic he wrestled for his very life to get free!

It was all in vain. The knot he was bound with was a bailiff’s shank, a cunning tangle that took two hands to tie but three to undo. He barely had a whole hand of fingers available between the two of them. Surrendering to whatever grisly fate he was now to suffer—“some ’orrible, gashing end,” as Master Fransitart would say—Rossamünd bowed his head and began once more to weep, waiting for some flash of pain or other rending violence.

Instead a sound came. It was a voice, small, soft and bubbling like a happy little runnel. “Look at you,” it said. “Look at you, strange little one who can cry. No need for crying now, no, no, no. Freckle is here and here he is. Lowly he might be, but not the least. A friend he is, and friendly too. So no crying now, no no, nor screaming nor throwing nor bumping of poor Freckle and his head about this little gaol.”

Despite himself Rossamünd felt calmed, and reluctantly turned his head. The round yellow eyes had returned and were looking at him again, earnestly kind.

The foundling held his breath.

The eyes seemed to hesitate too. Then the voice that belonged to those eyes—that small, soft, babbling voice—said, “He is watching too, and knows you, oh yes, hm hm. Fret not. There is always a plan. Providence provides.You’ll see, you’ll see.”

“Who . . . who are y-you?” Rossamünd managed at last. He could see little else but those big eyes—maybe a small nose . . . he could not be sure.

“Why, I thought I said, or did I say I thought?” The eyes blinked a long, almost lazy blink. “Why, I am Freckle! Freckle who has been speaking all his thinking just now. I was afraid before, and I thought before that I would just think all my speaking and see what manner of strange little one you were. But I know now by your crying what you are and now I have no fear!” Though he could not see, Rossamünd could well imagine this creature smiling a rather self-satisfied smile. “Tell, little cryer, what is your name?”

“Um . . . it’s Rossamünd.”

There was a strange, gaggling noise, and Rossamünd had the impression that this was Freckle’s laugh. “I see and see I do. An obvious name. Here is a tree. I’ll call it ‘Tree.’ Here is a dog. I’ll call it ‘Dog’! Very clever! What a witty fellow who gave it to you! They must be a funny fellow indeed!” There was more of the gaggling laugh.

Rossamünd frowned. Witty and funny were not words he would have associated with Madam Opera, who had fixed his name by writing it in the ledger. “Why—why is my name so obvious?” the foundling pressed.

“Ah, your name is obvious by your weepy, weepy tears, little Rossamünd, that is all, nothing more.” This little fellow was very hard to understand. “And now we’re done our meetings,” it concluded. “I expect you’ve learned it that hands are shook together, to show a meeting met?”

A hand came out from a lower gap in the wood. This hand was about the same size as Rossamünd’s, though the fingers were longer, the wrist much thinner and the skin far rougher. Rossamünd gawped at it: this was most definitely not a person’s hand. He remembered himself, took it in his own grasp and politely shook. It felt warm and very much like the bark of a tree. Its grip was strong but gentle.

Looking into those bizarre yellow eyes, Rossamünd tried to show trustworthiness and friendship in his own. If he had to suffer imprisonment and oppression, then getting a chance to make friends with a kindly bogle was an odd yet amazing consolation. “Very pleased to meet you, Mister Freckle,” he said solemnly. Abuzz with curiosity, he could not help but go on and ask. “Excuse me, Mister Freckle . . . but are you a nuglung?”

Freckle laughed again. “They’ve taught you to divide and conquer too, I see—rule by division, divide by rules—the everyman creed. Ah, ’tis only fair. I named you first.” The eyes blinked again. “As it is, you make me much bigger than my boots. No-no-no, a nuglung princeling am I not. I am just what I am, what the everyman might go calling a glammergorn—though really, I am just one lonely Freckle. There is no other Freckle, just this one Freckle, until he is no more.” The eyes look skyward.

Rossamünd had seen a nuglung earlier that day, the sparrowling in the olive bush, and now he was actually talking with a glamgorn—which is what he understood Freckle to mean by “glammergorn.” These were even smaller than a nuglung, less powerful. Again he remembered the almanac’s warning, that it was best not to get too close to one.

Well, he wondered, what would the writers of Master Matthius’ Wandering Almanac say if they were watching me now?

“Give it to meeee,” hissed a new and broken voice.

Rossamünd started. The yellow eyes of Freckle blinked several times rapidly.

This new voice had come from the lonely crate on the steerboard side of the hold.

“Quiet, you!” Freckle warned.

“Give it to mee toooo.” The broken voice came again, full of creepy, lugubrious longings. “And to meee—we want to suck out its marrow . . . ooh yes, and squish its eyeballs a’tween our rotted teeth.” The crate from which it spoke rattled vigorously.

Rossamünd peered at it. A hunched darkness thrashed about spasmodically within. Fortunately its cage was chained fast to a thick oak beam. Nevertheless he shuddered and began to pry at the lashings that gripped his wrists.

Freckle’s voice became commanding and hard, contrary to his normal soft singsong. “His marrow is too well needed inside his bones, and his eyes are too busy at looking and weeping to need your gnawings!” The glamgorn’s golden eyes disappeared. “Now to quiet with you!” His voice spoke from the other side of its box.

There was a thwip! and a curse and an extraordinarily loud hiss from the lonely crate. “That struck us in the eye! Now we must have an eye, an eye for an eye, an eye . . . lov-er-ly eye . . .” Rotten lips smacked together.

“I know it did, and this I know, for it was sent on its mission so,” Freckle said proudly. “And even less eyes will you have if you don’t be leaving us be!”

There was another loud hiss. “You’d not be so brave if we weren’t bound so hard, scrumptious morsel. We plan to chew on your twiggy bones too . . . oh my, and me too . . .”

It became quiet.

Freckle’s yellow eyes reappeared.

“What is that?” Rossamünd whispered, still picking uselessly at the rope.

“That is an ill-made rever-man, all bits and bobs and falling apart. Those wicked ones who made him do not know their wicked business. He’s not knit too well at all, and none too sharp in the knitted noggin neither. Oh how he hates, full of grieving over half memories and wild hungers! They hate we natural ones most of all, ’cause we are made all right and they are made the everyman’s way—all wrong . . .”

A rever-man! A revenant! Rossamünd knew of these things. They were put together by wicked people taking bits of dead bodies to make new creatures from them, all rotting limbs and ravenous. So that was Poundinch’s secret trade, the reason for his suspicious conversations and the crazed flight from the Spindle. At last Rossamünd had discovered the truth. Rivermaster—or Captain, if that was how it was to be now—Poundinch was a smuggler for the dark trades, a trafficker of corpses and half-made undead. That was why he pretended to haul such odoriferous cargoes as swine’s lard and pungent herbs, to hide the stink of the contraband.

The foundling shuddered once more. He had to get away!

The hold of the Hogshead had now taken on a greater aspect of foul wickedness. Had it not, it still held a rever-man. Rossamünd did not care how poorly made it might have been. He did not like the idea of being confined so closely with one. Its rotten reek was beginning to overpower the other rancid airs in the hold—even that of the swine’s lard.

“Cut me loose!” he hissed to Freckle. “I have a knife still, hanging on my baldric. See?”

“Yes, I most definitely do see and see I do.” There was a tug on Rossamünd’s scabbard. “Yet my own hands are enough to do a knife’s work. Hemp and wood are one thing, Rossamünd, but iron just another. I can loose your bonds but mine I cannot, unless you have learned your strength as well?”

The foundling frowned. He was not strong enough. What was the glamgorn talking about? His hopes dimmed, and he sat for a time in a gloom. Gradually he became aware that his bottom was beginning to sting, as if he were being bitten by a thousand little ants.

“Ow! Ow!” Rossamünd realized he was experiencing the caustic nature of seawater for the first time. He had been sitting in the bilgewater long enough for it to start to eat at his skin. He stood as best he could, the rope bindings preventing him from achieving more than an awkward stoop. His backside stung.

A wicked, strangled giggle came from the lone crate.

“Not good for clothes nor delicate pink skin either,” observed Freckle, ignoring the rever-man’s malicious glee. “That’s why I like my barky hide. It hides me better from sneaky eyes and stops the stinging of the water.”

“Aye, I wish I had your skin,” Rossamünd agreed with a sagacious nod, “but just on my rear end.” Wanting to pick up a previous thought, he continued. “Mister Freckle? Which nuglung do you serve?”

Freckle sniffed in a breath. “My, my—there’s an everyman question if ever a question was one. No prying in private things! I’ve not asked you your private things and you shouldn’t go asking upon my private things. They’ve taught you far too well, I can well see, too well.”

Rossamünd hung his head in shame. Somehow it made sense that this glamgorn would not want to be telling an everyman child—even one as friendly and open as Rossamünd hoped he was being—much of secret bogle ways. The foundling was certain that if he were a bogle, he would not want to say a great deal to a person either—not unless he knew without a doubt that the person could be trusted. He apologized with a mutter, but pressed on to another mystery. “Please, at least, tell why my crying means you know my name?”

The glamgorn laughed his strange laugh. “Knowing, knowing—sometimes there has to be trusting too . . .” Freckle’s golden eyes frowned, then became kindly once again. “I can see you ain’t ready and I know there is a time and a place, a place and a time. I might be lowly, but even I know what to say and when not to say it. Yet the time might come for knowing things, and when the need of knowing’s nigh, you’ll know then what I do now.”

This was no help at all. Rossamünd wanted to push for more when there came the familiar thumping of boot steps on the deck above.

What now? Rossamünd quickly became quiet and the glamgorn’s eyes retreated into the obscurity of his prison.

Rossamünd followed the steps as they thudded overhead and trod toward the hatch. It opened and Captain Poundinch peered down, his attention darting to each crate before stopping upon the foundling. “Well, Rosey-me-lad, I see ye’re still in whole pieces.” He grinned leeringly. “I’ve come back sooner than I said, I know, but I figured ye’ll do yer thinkin’ just as well upon me other tub, th’ frigate Cockeril, as ’ere. Ye’ll like ’er, she’s a mite more spacious than th’ poor ol’ ’ogshead.”

He waggled a short-barreled pistola hidden beneath his coattails. Eyeing the firelock in fright, Rossamünd saw that its barrel was wider than usual—a weapon designed to knock a person down, to bludgeon him to death despite any type of proofing. “And I reckon this might serve as th’ best gag for our little stint to the Cockeril. No ’ollerin’s or screechin’s from ye, an’ there’ll be no shootin’s from me.”

Poundinch released the knot that held Rossamünd’s wrists to Freckle’s crate and jerked the foundling after him and back up the ladder. “So follow me lead and a simple jaunt from ’ere to there is all for ye and me to enjoy.”

Rossamünd strained his neck to try for a glimpse of Freckle. The glamgorn’s now sad eyes showed briefly.

“Farewell . . .” the foundling mouthed, just as he was hefted clear off the ladder by the easy might of the lumbering captain. He caught one last sight of Freckle blinking a solitary sorrow-filled blink.