Chapter Three
No one concentrated in school that day. The others kept asking me if I’d seen anything.
All I could say was that I’d seen the red lights.
‘But Storyteller told us more than that, and he wasn’t on the hill,’ said one girl plaintively. ‘He said they had cutlasses in their teeth, and one of them was thrown overboard for not being fearsome enough.’
I looked at her for a moment. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he is a storyteller.’
Even as I spoke, my mind drifted to the giant Heest. Could they be trained to repel pirates? Or would I just find out how Armoury really felt when she died?
Watchman was the only person I knew who wouldn’t run screaming if a Heest came near enough to be seen. Maybe he knew better than everyone else—including me.
Visions of Heest nagged at me all through my danc
