Beside one such letter Annie had written in a shaky arid somehow pathetic script entirely unlike her usual firm hard: Sticks stones will break my bones words will never hurt me.
He fled to that well now, like a thirsty animal finding a waterhole at dusk, and he drank from it; which is to say he found the hole in the paper and fell thankfully through it. From outside came the steady soft creak of lines and rigging, the slow flap of the sails in the first faint breezes of the freshening trade winds, the occasional cry of a bird.