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Lyr looks at him, he cannot imagine why this man is telling him this.

“They will leave him with ten barrels of fresh water. The barrels are big enough for a man to hide inside. He would not suffer much if one of the barrels he was sent with did not contain water.”

Lyr doesn’t know who this man is or why he is helping him. It doesn’t matter. “Please,” he says. “Show me the way.”

Lyr has a knife inside the barrel, a small stout blade strong enough for him to pry it open. He also has supplies: linen wound dressings and jars of salix and sofi.

When he escapes the barrel, he finds himself inside a keep. When he walks outside he sees Damon, lying unconscious on a pallet in front of the building. On the horizon, he can see the ship. He slinks back inside and waits until it has vanished from view.

When he is sure it is safe he walks over to Damon, cautious, taking care not to startle him. His back is one festering wound. He looks ashen, his skin is paler than Lyr has ever seen it.

In the keep, he finds two bedchambers upstairs. He doesn’t think Damon will be able to walk up stairs and Lyr cannot carry him. So he brings a straw-stuffed mattress and linens down to the kitchen and makes a bed in front of the fire. He lights the fire and uses some of the hard bread and water to make a porridge, which he sets to warm.

He lifts Damon from the pallet and supports him into the keep and onto the bed where he puts him to lie on his belly. He cleans the wounds on his back.

Damon moans, “Lyr?”

“It’s me. I’m here.”

He puts sofi and salix in Damon’s porridge and feeds him, then lets him sleep.

He remembers an old trick his mother taught him once and leaves some damp bread in a corner to grow mould.

Full of sofi, Damon sleeps.

Lyr explores the island. It is cooler here than in Attar. The wind from the Sterum Ocean is sharp. He salvages some food from the ruined garden. Some apples and roots that were missed in the enforcers' hasty destruction of anything that would help Damon survive. He will add them to the next porridge he makes.

There are birds in the trees. Most are black, brown and grey, but there is the occasional bright green flash of a calcis bird. Calcis birds are familiar to Lyr. He knows they are not found naturally in this part of the world. They’re from Ik-Sundal, a long way southeast. But they fly wild everywhere. They sang with the mortingales in the gardens of Sanglora. And they even survive here. Lyr has seen them in cages being sold at the markets on Klish and in Attar. Brought back by merchants and sold to be kept in parlours as pretty decorations. The wild ones must have escaped those cages, they have made their homes wherever they found themselves.

Calcis birds are long-lived and hardy. They are survivors. Like me, Lyr thinks. Survivors, a long way from home.

He watches them looping in the sky. He remembers a story Jareleezi told him once of another bird, the calidrius bird, a bird that could heal wounds with its magical song. Could calcis birds be relations of the calidrius bird? Could their presence here be a good omen?

Is there such a thing? If Damon dies Jareleezi’s Gods were wrong.

And if he lives…?

Damon does live.

He recovers slowly, over the following days. Lyr is already concerned about how long their provisions will last. Water is not a concern. As the man who freed him promised, Sanvicta has many streams. But enough bread to last Damon forty days is even less when Lyr has to eat too, even when he tries to take as little as he can.

Lyr worries what will happen when the bread runs out. He searches the garden for any more food that is left behind. He thinks the olive tree may have survived, but it will not bear fruit for months. The weather seems to get colder every day. It is hard to see how they will survive the coming winter.

When the damp bread Lyr left starts to bloom mould, he spreads a little of it carefully over the worst of the wounds on Damon’s back.

As he does so, Damon says, softly “I made plans.”

“Plans for us?” Lyr leans forward.

“Plans for me. It was before I ever knew about you. But you remember that it was only a short while after I was given Sanvicta that Atticul discovered my sin with Plumillar. I knew what I was and I knew what my fate would be if I were ever punished for my sins.”

“What do you mean?”

Damon smiles. It is the first time he has smiled on Sanvicta. “I always knew I might end up in this place. And what they would do if I were exiled here. So I planned for it. There are supplies here. There is a secret cellar.”

The secret cellar is below the main cellar under the keep. Its entrance is a trap door disguised to look like another flagstone. When Lyr gets it open he finds sacks of barley and lentils, apples carefully preserved in boxes. There are even some barrels of wine.

Lyr’s heart leaps to see it. Nothing less than salvation. He moves around the room cautiously, as if this miracle cannot be real, but in each sack and barrel and box, he finds food, carefully preserved. He’s not sure if it is enough to see them through the winter, to keep them alive until he can replant and salvage the garden, but it could be. If he is careful.