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“It's a chain,” I say. “Each site tells you where the next one is. He never wrote a master list, because a master list can be stolen. He put one link inside each cache and buried them separately.”

“Which means the men who took the first crystal⁠—”

“Have the link to number two.” I check the notation twice, because I need this to be right more than I have needed anything in years. “But so do we. It's cut into the underside of the cradle. I felt it when I was reaching for the second crystal and I thought it was corrosion.”

Draeven turns. There's a pause of about three seconds.

“Say the bearing,” he says.

“South-southwest. Past the three-legged platform, then⁠—”

He hits me.

That's what it feels like. What actually happens is that he crosses six meters in a fraction of the time it should take, gets an arm around my back, and puts us both flat behind the spoil heap as something goes through the air where my head was and takes a fist-sized piece out of the cypress behind us.

The sound arrives afterward. It's very small. Nothing that quiet should be able to do that to a tree.

“Don't move,” he says, against my ear. “Don't stand. Whatever happens, don't run for the skiff.”

“That's where the boat is.”

“That's where they want you.”

Then he's gone, and I mean gone. I'm looking directly at the place he was and there is only marsh grass, and then forty meters away a man I never saw arrive makes a sound I'm going to be hearing for a while.

I count four. Four voices, four positions, and Draeven moving between them like weather. He doesn't shoot at anybody. Twice I catch the shape of him against a reed bank when the light turns wrong, and both times he's already somewhere else by the time my eyes catch up.

It takes ninety seconds. I know because I count, out loud, into the mud, the way I count children onto a bus.

When he comes back for me the color returns to him from the tail forward, and he's bleeding from a shallow line across the ribs, and the first thing he says is not about any of that.

“The journal.”

“In the satchel. Dry.”

“Good.” He pulls me upright with one hand under my arm, gentler than the situation calls for. “They came for the notes. Not the crystal. They knew you'd have it with you.”

We take a channel back that isn't the one we came by, and he makes me lie flat in the bottom of the skiff for the first kilometer, and he doesn't say anything else until Mountmend is in sight through the reeds.

Here's what I have decided, somewhere between the shooting and the stilts.

A man who does that job for money keeps himself alive first. He asked about a book.

“Draeven.”

“What.”

“You're going to let me help. Not follow. Help.”

He watches the village come up out of the water, and for a long moment I think he's simply going to ignore me until I go away, the way he's been ignoring me since the island.

“South-southwest,” he says. “Past the platform on three legs. Then what?”

I permit myself, silently and thoroughly, to be pleased.

CHAPTER 4

DRAEVEN