The Enemy Captain's Evidence

The Carrick boat struck on the outer rocks of the Skerrow a little after dawn on the twenty-third, and by nine o'clock Marr was on her way to take its people off.

She had listened to Annet Sorn for an hour before that, in the Kestrel's cabin, with the survey spread on the table and the wardwright's family asleep in Rusk's cot. She had not slept since. The survey went with her into the stern of Lew Farrow's boat, pale blue basins and red figures, and a protection ceremony before the ninth.

The wreck lay on a reef called the Teeth, on the north side of the Skerrow's ring of islands, seven miles south-west of Fallow Creek. This was open water, outside every engine's field, under a low gray sky with a fresh breeze from the west. Marr could see the Skerrow from two miles off: a ring of low brown islands, with masts showing over them where Vaust's supply ships lay at anchor in the lagoon inside. The wreck was on the outer edge, well away from the anchorage. She could see the boat on its side on the reef with the sea breaking over it, and five men clinging to the rocks above it.

"They're Carrick men," Lew said. "I know the boat. Her master was coming to us with word from the Captain."

"Then we take them off and go."

"And the anchorage?" Lew asked.

"Is on the other side of the islands," Marr said. "We'll be in and out in half an hour."

She was out by about twenty minutes.

They took the five fishermen off the reef in the boat's lee, one at a time, with a line and a great deal of shouting. The master came last, with a broken wrist and a waterproof packet in his teeth. He spat it into Marr's hand as they hauled him in.

"From the Captain," he said. "Holy Deep, that's cold."

Lew was already putting the boat's head round for home when the lookout in the prow shouted.

A ship was coming round the western end of the Skerrow under topsails, sailing hard on the breeze and heeling to it. She was long and black and low, with a high, raked foremast and a long line of carriage ports in her side. Marr knew her before she could see her name. She had watched her from the Kestrel's deck at the edge of the Pennant Flats with her lantern dipping in salute.

"Resolute," Lew said.

No boat could outrun her. The breeze was west and fresh, and Resolute had it on her beam and could make nine knots to the boat's four. Her cutter was in the water before she had come up to them, full of men with crossbows. Marr sat in the stern and counted them: twenty-two, and an officer.

"We can make the shoals," Lew said. His face was set. "If we pull for the Teeth, she can't follow us in."

"We'd get the boat shot to pieces, and these men with it." Marr looked at the five fishermen huddled wet in the bottom boards, and at Lew's four oarsmen, and at the crossbows. "No."

The cutter came alongside with its weapons up. In the sternsheets sat a young officer with a pale, serious face and a lieutenant's knot on his shoulder.

"Commander Marr," he said. He had a western voice, quieter than most. "Lieutenant Sabin, of the Resolute. Captain Venn's compliments. She asks you to come aboard."

"And the boat?" Marr asked.

"The Captain says you, and the men you took off the reef. The boat and its crew may go." He looked at Lew Farrow. "She says to tell whoever you answer to that she'll be off the north rocks of the Skerrow at noon on the twenty-fifth, under a white flag, to talk about an exchange."

Marr looked at the crossbows, and unbuckled her sword belt and handed it across to Sabin, hilt first, and stepped into the cutter. The five fishermen came after her. Their master held his broken wrist against his chest and glared at everyone.

"Commander," Lew said.

"Go home, Lew. Tell the Captain what she said." Marr sat down on the cutter's thwart. "And tell him I have his packet."

Ilyra Venn received her in the great cabin of the Resolute, standing, with the stern windows behind her and the pale light coming through them. She was tall and black-haired, a few years younger than Marr, with a long, dark, intelligent face. Her right forearm was bound up in clean linen from wrist to elbow, and she held it a little away from her side. Marr had put that cut in it two weeks ago, in a pinnace off Darn harbor mouth.

"Commander," Venn said.

"Captain," Marr said.

"Sit down. You're wet." Venn did not sit herself. "I'll tell you how this goes, so you don't waste your breath. You're an officer of the Compact. I'll hold you as one. Your fishermen will be fed and dried and sent ashore at Carrick after the exchange. I'll trade you for whoever your people have of mine. You'll be treated well. I don't want a speech about my Admiral. I've heard them all. I've heard them from better speakers than you. Is that understood?"

"Perfectly," Marr said. She sat down. "I won't make you a speech."

"Good," Venn said.

"I'll tell you where to look," Marr said. "Then you can look or not."

Venn's face did not change. "Go on, then. Briefly."

"There's a sealed order gone from the Admiral to the Greyhaven garrison, by the Petrel," Marr said. "It takes every soldier off the Basin and the Wendle Levels before the ninth of November, for what it calls a protection ceremony. An engineer named Lockwood has fitted the sluice gates there with plates cut at Darn, and Crown carries the machine that opens them. Twenty-six thousand people sleep behind those gates, and not one of them is to be moved."

"Who told you this?" said Venn.

"A wardwright named Annet Sorn, whom we took out of Darn last night," Marr said. "She cut the plates."

"A prisoner who hates us," Venn said.

"Yes," Marr said.

"Who would say anything," Venn said.

"Yes," said Marr. "So don't believe her. Don't believe me. The Petrel calls at the Skerrow every third day on her way west. If I'm right, the duplicate of that order is in her dispatch bag, and Lockwood may be aboard her too. You know where to look. I don't need you to believe anything."

"She's due this afternoon," Venn said, half to herself. She crossed to the cabin door and opened it.

"Sabin," she said. "The Commander goes to the bread room, under guard. Dry clothes and hot food. No talk with her." She turned back. "You've made a mistake, Commander. You've given me something I can check. When it isn't there, I'll know what else you lie about."

"Yes," Marr said. "You will."

The bread room was a small, dry, lamplit space under the after cabins, lined with tin bins. Marr sat on a bin in borrowed western clothes, a wool shirt and a fisherman's trousers, and ate a bowl of fish stew that was better than Orris's. She did not tell anyone so.

She opened Rusk's packet by the lamp. It held a single sheet.

"Pilots agreed. Mother Quenby gives her terms on the twenty-fifth at Gull Ness. She wants something from me in front of her sons. I suspect it is my pride. Darn rising set for the springs, the twenty-sixth, at the evening bell. Moll agrees. R."

She folded it small and put it inside her shoe.

At four in the afternoon she heard a hail on deck and the thump of a boat alongside, and men's feet overhead, and Venn's voice giving orders. Through the bread room's one deadlight, a thick disk of glass in the ship's side, she could see a slice of water and part of another vessel's hull, very near. It was long and light and yellow-painted, with a name in black letters on its quarter. Petrel.

After that, nothing for three hours. The light in the deadlight faded and went out. Somebody brought her bread and cheese and took the bowl away. She heard the Petrel's boat come and go, and come again.

At half past seven the door opened and Sabin stood there with a lantern.

"The Captain wants you," he said. "You're to sit where she puts you and speak only when she asks you something."

There were three people in the great cabin besides Venn. Two were marines with drawn swords, by the door. The third sat on a stool in the middle of the floor, in the full light of the hanging lamp, and he was frightened.

He wore a good brown coat with ink on its cuffs and a ring on his little finger, and he was plump and soft and perhaps forty. His round, clever face was sweating.

Venn sat at her table with her bound arm across it. On the table in front of her lay a packet of heavy paper, its red seal cracked across, and beside it a second, thinner letter, unsealed.

"Sit there, Commander," she said, pointing at the locker under the stern windows. "Master Lockwood, this is a Compact officer. A prisoner. She means nothing to you. Go on with what you were saying."

Lockwood looked at Marr and away again. "I don't see why I should say any of it, Captain. I'm on the Admiral's business. I have a pass under his own hand. You've broken an Admiral's seal."

"I have," Venn said. "I'll answer for it. You'll answer my questions. The ward plates. Where are they?"

"Fitted," Lockwood said. "I told you. All of them."

"Fitted where?" Venn asked.

"In the gatehouses. Greyhaven Basin, both gates. Wendle Levels, eleven gates." Lockwood wiped his face with a handkerchief. "The plates were cut at Darn by the wardwrights, to my design. I took them over by the Petrel and bolted them on myself. Inside the master housings. The garrison doesn't know what they are. They're never touched. They're quite safe."

"And in the gate races?" Venn asked.

His eyes went to Marr again. "I don't know what you mean."

"In the gate races, Master Lockwood," Venn said.

"The outpost fittings." He said it fast, like a man pulling a splinter. "Small ones. Two at the Basin, one in each gate race, sunk under the sill where the stream runs through. The Wendle ones go down from Crown's boats on the day, as she comes along the coast. They take their power from the stream. They're quite small. They do nothing by themselves."

"What do they do," said Venn, "when the gates are open?"

Lockwood said nothing.

"When will the gates be open?" Venn asked.

"I'm a gate engineer, Captain," Lockwood said. "I fit what I'm told to fit."

"When," Venn said.

"At the springs." He swallowed. "Crown comes through the strait on the tenth of November, and down the coast on the next tides, while they are still high. The drum on Crown releases the plates. It needs to come within three miles, and the tide must be at the top. It's all in the order." He waved a damp hand at the cracked packet. "It's in the order. The protection ceremony."

Venn's eyes came to Marr for an instant and went back to Lockwood. Venn had not used the phrase; he had brought it out himself.

"The garrison comes off the Basin before the ninth," Venn said. "It says so here. What about the people who sleep there? The tannery workers. The market gardeners. The farm villages on the Levels. Twenty thousand, Master Lockwood, and six thousand more. When are they to be moved?"

"They're not," Lockwood said.

"Why not?" Venn asked.

Lockwood looked at her as though the question was foolish. Then he reached into his coat, slowly, with the marines watching him, and drew out a folded letter and held it out. Venn took it one-handed and opened it on the table.

"I asked the same thing," Lockwood said. "In writing. I'm a careful man. That's the answer. From the flag captain, under the Admiral's seal."

Venn went over it once. She turned it round on the table and pushed it toward Marr.

It was short, and written in a good clerk's hand, and signed by Captain Harrow Quill for the Admiral. Marr went over it twice, though once was enough.

"No civilian movement from the Basin or the Levels is to be permitted or encouraged before the ceremony. Any such movement would warn the coast and the Compact. The engineer will confine himself to his duties."

Marr looked up. Venn was watching her across the table, and her face was the color of candle wax.

"Take him below," Venn said to the marines. "Feed him. He's not to speak to the Petrel's people."

When the door had closed, she sat with her good hand on the cracked packet. Out on deck the watch was changing. Marr heard the bell, and feet, and someone laughing.

"You'll say I should be surprised," Venn said.

"I won't say anything," Marr said.

"Good. Because I'm not surprised. I've served him eleven years. I've seen him do hard things, and I've done them for him. I chased you onto the Pennant Flats. I hunted your boats with the drowned swimming beside mine." She turned the seal over with one finger. "I thought he meant to hold the coast. Hold it, and feed it, and make the Compact answer for the west. I thought the dead were a weapon he'd put away when the work was done."

"And now?" Marr asked.

"Now I'll ask him." Venn stood up. "The Petrel sails for Lisk Roads at first light. Crown lies there. I'll be aboard her by afternoon and back by night. Sabin will hold the ship. You'll stay in the bread room."

"Captain," Marr said. "If you ask him and he says what that letter says, what will you do?"

"I don't know," Venn said. "That's why I'm asking."

She was gone all the next day. Marr sat in the bread room and listened to the ship.

A ship tells you things if you know how to listen. By the forenoon watch she could hear the talk change on the deck over her head. It went quiet when an officer came by, and started again lower when he had passed. She heard a man in the next compartment say "the Basin" and another tell him to shut his mouth. At noon she heard two men quarreling outside the bread room door in western speech too fast for her to follow, until one of them said "Sabin" and they both went away.

Sabin brought her dinner himself. He stood in the doorway while she ate.

"Where are you from, Lieutenant?" she said.

"Lisk." He hesitated. "My mother's people were from the Levels, Commander. On the mainland. Wendle. She married west."

"Are any of them still there?" Marr asked.

"Two aunts. A grandfather. Cousins." He took the empty bowl from her and looked at it. "The Captain told the officers this morning before she went. What's in the order. Not the men yet."

"And what do the officers say?"

"Most of us say we'll wait for the Captain." He turned to go and stopped. "Lieutenant Hyde says the Admiral knows his business, and it's not for us to look in his dispatch bags. The master-at-arms says the same. Flint. He was at Ember Roads, on the corsair side. He's served the Admiral since."

"Thank you, Lieutenant," Marr said.

"I've told you nothing, Commander." His face was pale and serious. "I've told you nothing you couldn't hear through the deck."

Ilyra Venn had eaten at that table perhaps forty times in eleven years, and the lamb was as good as it had always been.

Crown's great cabin ran the width of the ship, and the ship was broad. The stern windows were shuttered against the dark of Lisk Roads. One lamp hung over the table, and the Admiral sat under it with his back to the windows, carving. He carved like a fisherman gutting a catch, fast and without waste, and he gave her the first slice, as he had since she was a lieutenant.

"Show me that arm," he said. "Ardent's captain says a Compact commander did it, off Darn, from a pinnace."

"She was better than I thought," Venn said.

"They're always good at sea. It's the men who sign their orders I'd hang." He sat, and poured. It was the Lisk red he had laid down before the war, and he poured it himself, because he kept no servant at dinner. Silver hair, cut short. A plain blue coat with the salt dried white at the cuffs. He was a small man with a harbor-master's voice, made for hailing across a wharf in a gale, and he had never learned to keep it down at table. "You've had your hand on that coat since you came up the side, Ilyra. Put the letter on the table. I'd sooner have it out than watch you sit on it all night."

She put it on the table. He left it there, and looked at it from where he sat, and ate.

"Quill's hand," he said. "My order. Yes."

"Twenty-six thousand people, sir," Venn said.

"Lockwood says twenty-six. He's short by a thousand, because Lockwood doesn't walk those streets after dark. I know the number, Ilyra. Don't put it to me as if I'd never looked." He drank. "It's no feint, and it's no figure for frightening Southwick. The Basin and the Levels go under at the November springs, at night, with the fittings in the races, and what drowns there gets up. After that my ally has a foothold behind every gate on that coast, and the Compact can build all the fleets it likes. You can't blockade a drain."

"And the people."

"Are the price." He put his fork down. "Do you know what I did, the year after Ember Roads? I dug. My sister's two boys. The girl who kept the harbor lamps at Sallow. Men I'd sailed with since we were ten years old. And every month a letter came from Southwick, very fine, with the Admiralty's regrets and its earnest attention and its compliments. Nobody hanged for that, because nobody had to sign for it. I've signed for this. I'll answer for every one of them, and I'll do it on my feet." He picked the fork up again, and his hand shook. "After that comes food. Courts. Boats that come when they're called. In ten years they'll be glad of me, and in twenty they won't remember why they weren't."

"You said once it was a weapon," Venn said. "You said you'd put it away."

"I said I could hold it, and I can. It keeps its bargains. It's kept every one." He cut a second slice and laid it on her plate. "I know what it is. I'm no fool, and I've stood nearer to it than any man in the west. It's worse than the corsairs. It's worse than the Compact, and worse than anything I ever fought. But it came when I called, and nothing else ever did. The drowned will forgive me. They're island people, most of them. They know what waiting costs."

She thought: he has spoken with it. There was an iron door on the orlop, low on the starboard side below the frame room, with a marine on it day and night, and in eleven years she had never asked what was behind it. She thought: he knows it is a wolf. He let it in because it was the only thing that ever came when he called, and he has told himself the flock will understand.

"Eat your dinner," he said. "Then I'll walk you to the boat. You've had a bad week, and Resolute wants you back. I'd rather have you angry on your own deck than content on anyone else's."

She ate her dinner. He walked her to the side himself, and gave her his hand at the top of the ladder, and she took it, as she always had. The letter was in her coat. Nothing had been decided, and the Petrel's boat took her away across the black water with the lamp in his stern windows the last thing she saw of Crown.

Venn came back at nine that night.

Marr heard the Petrel's boat, and the side party's whistle, and Venn's voice on deck: three words, and silence after them. A few minutes later Sabin came for her. He brought her sword belt, and he gave it to her in the bread room doorway without a word.

Venn was alone in the great cabin. She stood at the stern windows in her boat cloak, facing the dark glass, and she did not turn round when Marr came in.

"It's his," she said. "He said so over the lamb. He said the loss is the necessary price of the coast, and that the Compact let the west drown for twenty years and nobody called it a crime."

"Is he wrong about that?" Marr asked.

"No," said Venn. "It doesn't help." She turned, and took off the boat cloak, and dropped it on the table. Under it she wore her sword. "He was patient with me, as you'd be with a junior officer who's had a bad week. He means to govern whoever is left."

"I've told my officers," she said. "Just now, on deck. Sabin is with me, and the master, and most of the warrant officers. Hyde is not. Flint is not. I gave them the night to think, and the choice to go ashore at Carrick if they wished, with no harm done to them." She looked up at Marr. "I've given you back your sword, Commander. I'd sooner you used it on them than me. I'm taking this ship out of the Skerrow tonight. I need you to tell me where your people are, and how to come in among them without being shot."

"Fallow Creek, on Brindle," Marr said. "Seven miles north-east. You'll need the flood to get her over the bar. They answer a lantern code from the creek mouth. I'll give it to you, and the countersign."

"Countersign," said Venn, and almost smiled. "After the Skerrow. Yes. I'd want one too."

They came for the arms chest in the middle watch.

Marr was asleep on the locker under the stern windows, in her clothes, with her sword beside her. She woke to a shout on the deck below, and a crash, and the clash of steel, and she was on her feet with the blade out before she knew what had woken her. Venn was already at the door with a lantern in her left hand and her sword in her right, the bound arm and all.

"The arms chest," Venn said. "Berth deck, forward of the mainmast. Hyde's gone for it."

They went down the after ladder into the berth deck. It was a long, low space, lit by two swinging lanterns, with hammocks slung from every beam, and men were tumbling out of them shouting and grabbing for anything they could reach. Forward, by the mainmast, the arms chest stood open. A knot of men stood round it with cutlasses and boarding pikes, fifteen of them perhaps, and more were taking weapons out of it and passing them back. Hyde was among them, a fair, heavy young officer with his sword out. Flint stood at the chest itself, scarred and thick through the shoulders, with a boarding axe.

Between them and the after ladder, Sabin and a dozen men with whatever they had grabbed were trying to hold the deck. Two men lay on the planks already. One was not moving.

"Hyde!" Venn's voice cut through the noise. "Put it up. Put it up, and you go ashore at Carrick tomorrow, every one of you. I gave you my word."

"You've broken the Admiral's seal and you're taking his ship to the enemy," Hyde shouted back. "Your word's worth nothing, Captain. Flint!"

Flint came down the deck with the axe.

Under the hammocks a long sword had no room. Marr shortened her grip and went forward beside Venn. A man with a pike came at her out of the press. She let the point go past her side and cut him across the hands, and he dropped it, and somebody behind him fell over him. Another swung a cutlass at her head and the blade caught in a hammock lashing above her and hung there. She ran him through the shoulder before he could free it.

The deck heaved under her. The ship was riding to her anchor, and with the tide turning she swung and rolled, and the lanterns swung with her. Shadows jumped up the hammocks and down again. Marr fought in a narrow space between a beam and a hanging hammock, and the hammock kept swinging into her eyes.

Beside her, Venn met Flint.

The master-at-arms swung the axe two-handed at her head. Venn caught it on her blade and turned it, and the shock went through her bound arm, and Marr saw her face go white. Flint swung again. Venn stepped back, and her heel caught on the fallen man behind her, and she went down on one knee.

Marr put her blade between them. The axe came down on it near the hilt and nearly tore it from her hand. She held. She drove the axe aside with both hands on her hilt and kicked Flint in the knee as hard as she could. He staggered. Sabin came in from the side with a cutlass and cut him across the neck and shoulder, and the big man fell forward across the deck and lay there.

Hyde came through the gap where Flint had been. He went for Venn while she was on one knee, and his sword went across her side over the ribs. She made a sound between her teeth and threw herself back, and his point followed her.

Marr moved to meet it, and a man with a pike came between them and she had to deal with him. Across his shoulder she saw Venn go flat on the deck under Hyde's point, and cut from there, left-handed and low, across the back of his leg. Hyde's knee went. He came down on it with a shout. Venn came up off the planking on her good arm with the blood running down her side, and her blade was at his neck before he had his sword up.

"Strike," she said. "Tell them to strike, Mister Hyde, or I'll do what he did to Flint."

Hyde looked up at her with his mouth bleeding. Round them the fighting had begun to slacken. The men at the arms chest had seen Flint fall. Two of them threw down their pikes.

"Strike," Hyde said thickly. "Strike, damn you all. Throw them down."

They threw them down. Venn stayed on her feet until the last pike was on the deck, and then sat down where she stood.

It had cost four men dead, and seven hurt, and Venn. She sat against the mainmast with her hand pressed to her side, and blood ran between her fingers. The ship's surgeon was a little bald man who cursed steadily in western speech while he cut her shirt away. Marr knelt beside them with a lantern.

"Is it deep?"

"It's across the ribs," the surgeon said. "Not into them. She's lucky. She's a fool. Hold the light lower."

Venn looked up at Marr, her face gray and wet in the lantern light.

"Get the anchor up," she said. "Sabin has the deck. Tell him to slip the cable if he has to, I don't care about the anchor. I want to be out of the Skerrow before the supply ships see what we've done."

"I'll tell him," Marr said.

"Commander." Venn's good hand caught at Marr's sleeve. "The lantern code. Give it to Sabin. Not to me. If I'm out of my head by the time we raise your creek, I want him to have it."

Marr went up on deck. The Skerrow lagoon was black around them, with the riding lights of the supply ships scattered across it and a lamp burning on the guard ship at the entrance. Somebody over there had heard the fighting. A bell was ringing on the guard ship, and lights were moving along her deck.

Sabin was at the wheel. Marr told him the code: two lanterns, one above the other, shown and hidden three times, and the answer from the creek mouth, one red. And the countersign, to be called across the water when they hailed. The written lists had never reached the scattered boats, so the creek still kept the first pair: Enoch's cat and Pudding.

He said it over to himself without smiling, and put his head back and bellowed for the axe at the cable.

They slipped the cable and let her fall off with the tide under her, and the topsails dropped and filled. Resolute went out through the north channel of the Skerrow with the guard ship's bell clanging behind her and a single bolt going wide over her stern. Nothing else followed. Nothing in that anchorage could catch her, and every captain in it knew it.

They raised Fallow Creek at first light on the twenty-fifth, with the flood making over the bar and the woods of Brindle black against a pale sky.

Sabin brought her in himself. He showed the two lanterns from the foretop, three times. Nothing answered for the length of a slow breath, and another. At last a single red light showed low at the creek mouth, among the trees.

"Resolute," a voice called across the water. Marr knew it: Isobel Wray. "Enoch's cat."

Sabin glanced at Marr. She nodded, and he put his hands to his mouth.

"Pudding," he called, and his men looked at him.

"Bring her in," Isobel called. "Slowly. There are crossbows on you from both banks. Keep your hands where we can see them."

Resolute came into Fallow Creek on the flood with her ensign flying upside down and her ports shut, at a walking pace, and every soul on her deck stood with empty hands. Marr saw the crossbows as they came in: on the banks among the trees on both sides, the heavy carriage crossbows from the Kestrel's deck dragged ashore and laid on the creek, and men behind them with their hands on the triggers. Not one of them moved their aim.

The Kestrel lay at the head of the creek with her stick of a mast, and every one of her people was on her deck, armed.

And on the bank beside her, standing alone at the water's edge, was Rusk.

Resolute came to a stop in the middle of the creek and her anchor went down. Marr went to the rail where he could see her.

He looked at her across forty yards of black water. He did not smile. She saw his shoulders go down an inch, as a man's do when he sets down a load.

"Commander," he called. "You've brought a guest."

"Captain Venn's compliments," Marr said. "She's hurt and below. Her people are hers. Her ship is hers. She has an order under Vaust's seal and a letter from his flag captain that I think you'll want to see. And she has a gate engineer named Lockwood in her hold."

Rusk looked past her at Resolute: the black hull and the shut ports, the westerners standing at her rail with their empty hands, the upside-down ensign.

"Then here are the terms," he said, loud enough for every man on both decks to hear. "Her people keep their ship. Our people stand guard on it, day and night. Her weapons go into the Kestrel's hold until the Commander and I say otherwise. Her captain is welcome at our table, and so are her officers. Any of her people who want to go ashore at Carrick may go, unharmed. Any man who lays a hand on one of them, from either ship, answers to me."

There was a silence on both decks.

"Those are fair," Sabin said, beside Marr. He said it quietly. "Fairer than we'd have given."

"He means them," Marr said.

On the bank, Orris had hobbled up behind Rusk on a crutch, his splinted leg swinging. He leaned on the crutch and studied the black ship in the creek.

"Salt and blazes," he said. "I suppose I'll have to feed them."

No one on Resolute laughed, or on the Kestrel either, and the crossbows on the banks stayed where they were.