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them?’
    ‘It’s strong men that are needed, not girls,’ he said roughly.
    Katla’s nostrils flared. ‘I can fight as well as my brothers: I can wrestle better than Halli and wield a sword better than Fent—’
    ‘You are not going. Your mother needs you here.’
    ‘My mother! All I do is get under her feet and remind her what a hard job it’s going to be to marry me off—’
    Aran gripped her so hard that she almost yelped. ‘When I make this expedition you will be running Rockfall with Bera: you’d better start learning the way of things now.’
    ‘But Da!’ Treacherously, Katla’s eyes had filled with sudden, scorching tears. If she could not sail to Halbo, she’d been consoling herself that at least she’d be sailing with the expedition force, to find the legendary island of Sanctuary and the treasure that was hidden there. She blinked furiously. ‘You
need
to take me with you – who else can shin up the mastpole when the lines get tangled? Who else can feel the draw of the land when there’s none to be seen?’
    ‘I’ve nearly lost you twice, girl: I’d not forgive myself if I lost you again.’
    Katla wrenched herself free of his grasp so violently that Aran fell backwards, his head striking an outcrop of granite splotched with rosettes of gold lichen. She leapt to her feet, her shadow falling across him for a moment, then she took off down the cliff path without looking back.
    With a groan, Aran levered himself upright, an expression of pain tightening the lines on his handsome face, though it could not be said whether this expression were brought about by the knock he had taken from the granite or from some other, more interior, sensation.
    Overhead, a black-backed gull slipped sideways on a current of warm air, its shadow long in the low sun.
    ‘She said I must look well to you, Katla,’ the Master of Rockfall said softly, watching his daughter running wildly down the cliff, oblivious to the gorse and brambles which choked the path. ‘Or she would be back for you.’ He knew he would never tell her of the exchange he had had with the seither, not just because Katla would toss her head like a wayward pony and have her way out of sheer, cross-grained will, but out of some obscure shame in him that there might be other influences on their lives that he could not control, that some other force might already be pulling on the lines of his fate, and those of his family, too.
    Even downhill and at the breakneck speed that drove her it took Katla more than twenty minutes to reach the harbour. The first person she encountered there was Min Codface, Tam Fox’s right-hand woman, whose specialism within the mummers’ troupe was the throwing of knives with such accuracy that Tam liked to joke she could trim your beard and your nails and then kill you dead before you knew it. Min was a big woman, but even she was staggering under the weight of a huge wicker chest, around which she could see nothing at all: two more steps and she’d be in the sea. Katla caught hold of the chest and turned Min sideways with a foot’s length to spare.
    ‘Close one!’ grinned the knife-thrower, revealing the huge gap in her teeth that had caused some obscene merriment between Fent and Tam, before Min had threatened to punch their lights out, and even Fent had recognised someone potentially more violent than himself and had mumbled what amounted, almost, to an apology. ‘Thanks, chubb.’
    Min had developed a habit of referring to everyone as some type of fish or another. ‘He’s a right strange mullet,’ she’d said of one unfortunate lad who’d lost his balance on top of the human tower they’d been practising before the feast or, referring to one of the village girls, ‘Pretty as a speckled trout’; and ‘Your brother Halli seems like quite a fair carp,’ which was apparently a compliment. Katla had wondered whether Min had chosen her own name, or whether its imposition had coloured her view of the