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then he lives.
    But she was not as reassured as she had hoped.
    With a sigh, she turned from the window. Tomorrow they would begin the long voyage to Merithuros, and it would be wise to get whatever sleep she could, while she still had the enjoyment of a soft bed. Yet she lay awake for a long time that night.

D ARROW 1
    Far away, on a nameless sea, a boat rocked at anchor in the moonlight. It held one lonely, sleepless figure, a slightly-built man a few years from thirty, with fair hair and a silvery scar above his grey-green eyes. He stared at the slow-wheeling stars. A dark light glistened from the great square ruby ring he held, so it seemed that a dark ember, the heart of fire, shone on the palm of his hand. He had not yet slipped the ring onto his finger. It weighed in his hand, as heavy as trouble, as heavy as choice. Then he thrust it deep into his pocket, next to his heart, turned his cheek to the hard boards of the little boat, and tried to sleep.
    Heron was a light, quick craft, and easy to manage when the wind was in her sails, and as Darrow sat in the stern, one hand on the tiller and an eye to the rigging, he was able to let his mind roam. He was speeding back to Ravamey at last, back to Calwyn. But his thoughts returned insistently to Merithuros, and to Samis. He remembered the beginning of their last voyage together, and how they’ d stared across the rail of the big Gellanese galleon, watching as the golden dunes receded into haze. He hadn’ t been sorry to leave the Empire behind; he was eager to reach the Westlands, the home of chantment, eager to begin their adventures. And Samis – Samis must have been planning even then. As he stared over the rail, did he vow never to return until he was the Singer of all Songs and Emperor of all Tremaris?
    Darrow shivered. Would he ever stop thinking about Samis? The man haunted him. Since Darrow was a child of twelve, Samis had dominated his life. ‘Let me be!’ he muttered, and hauled the tiller across, so that the wind bellied the canvas of his sail. He’ d hoped that when he left Samis behind in Spareth, dead, their bond would be severed.
    Impatiently he turned his mind to the time in his life before he knew Samis existed. He remembered another ship, another voyage, and a small boy, hardly big enough to peep over the side –

    The boy was born on the ship Gold Arrow . The captain is his father, and the captain’ s wife his mother, but the whole crew is his family. He runs up and down the rigging with ease so the sailors call him Mouse. They carve toy mice for him out of whalebone, and teach him how to play dice and knucklebones. He sleeps in a hammock in his parents’ cabin, and he rocks with the rhythm of the ship, and watches the shadows swing as the lantern swings. His mother sits nearby with a brush in her hand, and the lamplight glints on the pale shimmering silk of her hair.
    The whole ship is his home; he knows no other. He knows that the ship and all the sailors, his mother and father, are from Penlewin, and they teach him to be proud that he is a son of the marshlands. But he has never seen the marshes, and has only the vaguest notion of what they are. A wet land , they tell him, and he imagines an endless sea like the one they sail, but crowded with other boats, a community of ships and sailors.
    Yet when they come to port, the noise and the crowds frighten him. He clings to his mother’ s side. His father calls him a milksop, and sends him back to the ship. ‘He’ s only a baby, Jollan,’ his mother protests, but the little boy is glad to return to the safety of the ship and his own familiar hiding places.
    Arram is a wizened old dark-skinned sailor. The other crew treat Arram with a strange mixture of fear and respect and scorn, but Mouse is fascinated by him and his mysterious eye-patch, and wonders what lies beneath it.
    One day Arram sits by himself on the deck, mending a sail. Mouse creeps closer,