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The fun with the peasant would have been cut short so suddenly, but Verderol imposed his will to take flight, and the sheer freedom of the cool night air caressing his leathery wings brought such joy and delight to the dragon king that all disputes seemed insignificant.

The next day, a crowd of farmers gathered on the slope of the promontory and gazed at the scorched grass and the charred corpse. The Praetorian Guard was summoned, but, as was often the case with anything involving the brutal and unsociable Cyclopes, they were of little help. Displaying an attitude of sneering disdain as they looked upon the dead man's bereaved family, they promised that a report of the incident would be filed in Carlisle.

More than one of the gathered peasants claimed to have seen a huge winged beast flying around the area the night before; this, too, would be reported in Carlisle.

Verderol, once again in the comfortable, slender, and almost effeminate guise his subjects had come to know so well, the dark side of Dansallignatius appeased by the night of freedom, dismissed the reports as the product of simple peasants' overflowing imaginations.

"Surely, even the fishing is better these days!" shouted an elated Shamus McConroy.

He was the first mate of The Kite, a fishing boat based in the village of Gybi, a port north of Bae Colthwyn, on the always windswept northeast coast. So named for its tendency to leap over large waves, crashing head-on into them, barely touching the water, The Kite was among the most highly regarded sailing vessels in Bae Colthwyn's sizable fishing fleet. It was a 20-foot-wide vessel with a square sail and a crew of eight old sea dogs, not a single hair among them that wasn't gray.

Old Captain Aran Toomes preferred it that way and flatly refused to train a younger replacement crew.

"I can't waste time with puppies," the surly captain would grumble whenever someone commented that his vessel was doomed; "as deadly as a man," they said.

Toomes always accepted the joke with a grunt that showed he'd been through it all. At Bae Colthwyn, in the Back Sea, where the great killer whales prowled in great schools and storms came without warning, the fishermen left widows behind, and far more "pups" drowned than lived to manhood. Consequently, El Volantín's crew was a handful of hardened bachelors, hard drinkers, and reckless sailors who braved the mighty Dorsal Sea as if the great God had placed the waves in their path on a mere personal challenge. Day after day, the boat sailed faster and farther than any other in the fishing fleet.

Such was that midsummer day, as The Kite cut through the great waves, her sail full and taut. The weather seemed to change every hour; sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast, with that strange variation of the high seas, where the body is never at ease and feels either too hot or too cold. Other younger, less experienced sailors would have spent most of their time leaning over the rail, saying goodbye to their lunches, but the crew of The Kite, more at home at sea than on dry land, endured the changes on their knock-kneed legs without flinching.

And on that wonderful day, they were more cheerful than usual, as their beloved Eriador was once again independent. Pushed by a rebel army that had been forcing its way to the Avon city of Burgo del Príncipe, King Verderol had liberated Eriador, returning it to the people. The old sorcerer, Brind'Amour, a man of Eriadoran stock, had been crowned king at Caer MacDonald as spring gave way to summer. Not that life would change much for the fishermen of Bae Colthwyn, except, of course, that they would no longer have to deal with the bands of Cyclopes who came to collect taxes. King Greenrood's influence had never been very significant in the rugged northeastern region of Eriador, and the furthest south any of the fifty inhabitants of the bay had traveled was Mennichen Dee, on the northern fringes of Eradoch Fields.

Only the people of southern Eriador, in the foothills of the Ironcross Range, where King Greenrood's tyranny was felt in full force, would notice any appreciable change in their daily lives, but that was not the point. Eriador was free, and that cry for independence echoed across the land, from Ironcross to Albyngle, to the wooded northeastern wastes and the wild, rocky coast of Bae Colthwyn, and to the three northernmost islands: Marvis, Caryth, and wide-spreading Bedwydrin. Simple hope, that indispensable ingredient of happiness, had come to the wild, remote land personified by a king few north of Bruce MacDonald's Gap would ever see, and by a legend made real called the Crimson Shadow.

By the time news of their freedom reached the bay, the fleet had put to sea; the fishermen were singing and dancing on deck as if they sincerely believed the sea would be fuller of fish, as if they hoped the dorsal fins would turn tail and flee at the mere sight of a vessel flying the flag of ancient Eriador, as if they were convinced the storms would blow less fiercely, as if they thought nature itself would bow to the new king of Eriador.

What a wonderful thing hope is; and for all those who saw it on this station, and especially for the men who crewed it, it was as if The Kite leaped a little higher and cut through the dark waters a little faster.

Earlier that morning, Shamus McConroy spotted the first whale; its black dorsal fin rose higher than a man's head, slicing through the water less than fifty feet from the ship's starboard bow. With their usual abandon, the eight sea dogs hurled barbs and whiskey bottles at the great whale, challenging and cursing it, and as its fin dipped beneath the dark waters, moving away from the ship, they gave a rousing cheer and ignored it. The least experienced of the eight had been aboard for thirty years, and they had long since lost their fear of whales. They knew the dangerous cetaceans well; they knew when to mock them and when to flee, when to throw their catch into the water as a diversion, and when, as a last resort, to arm themselves with their long, sharp harpoons.

Shortly after, with not a trace of land in sight, Aran Toomes left the morning sun on his left shoulder as he set The Kite heading southeast toward the mouth of the strait between Eriador and the Five Sentinels, a string of islets where seabirds bred and where rocks were more abundant than turf. Toomes intended to be at sea for most of the week, making a passage of 100 miles a day. The course they had chosen would take them north of Colonsey, the largest and northernmost of the Five Sentinels, and then back out into the bay again. The old captain knew the water was colder there, just the way the cod and mackerel liked it. The skippers of the other fishing boats in Bae Colthwyn's fleet knew it too, but few had the audacity of The Flyer's crew or the self-confidence and knowledge of the Aran Sea that Toomes had.

Toomes held the course for three days until the peaks of the jagged Colonsey Mountains came into view. Then he began the long, slow turn, a 180-degree arc that took the boat northeast. Behind the captain, working hard, drinking heartily, and shouting with joy, his seven crewmen hauled in side nets and long lines loaded with fish: beautiful, shining, smelly, struggling cod and mackerel, and even blues, nasty little predators that swam and bit, swam and bit, never stopping long enough to finish devouring any hapless fish that came within range. Shamus McConroy worked a crowbar and bludgeoned the blues over the head until the constant clicking of those toothy maws ceased. He received a nasty bite on his ankle that passed clean through the hard boot, and the sailor's response was to lift the five-kilo blue by the tail and start hitting him repeatedly against the rail while the others cheered and applauded.

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