Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having a full purse following a modest and unexpected victory at the card table, the notion finally arrived in my tired head to leave this island. As it was the fledgling city of Auld Anchorage had set down only the beginnings of its wharves and factories at that time, clustered like barnacles across the island’s great sloping rocks. The few ships in its bay were cast up like driftwood, having arrived with the island’s settlers and remaining in no great hurry to raise their sails, if they had sails to raise. I had crewed one of those first ships, a terrible ship, now foundered and wrecked somewhere far from the shore and from the sun, and washing ashore I set up home on this island, vowing never to return to the broader waters of the world.

But the winds of that world were changing, and this great creaking galleon of the city was tacking with them, and I knew that it would not always hold a bunk for me. While I had sworn I would never take back up the spike or the harpoon, providence had that night given me the means to leave Auld Anchorage as a passenger, that I might buy my route to a home somewhere else in the discordant fleet of islands that formed this golden archipelago. Walking in the drowsy morning light from Fluke Hill down through Killick, I arrived at the harbour. Discounting the trading ships who could not be persuaded to slow their journeys, and passing the rotten hulks abandoned to the gulls, I stopped at a pier crowded with crates and provisions and a crew just shy of a dozen. Their stocky dark-wooded ship was the Haniver, and from the great barbs stacked along the gunwale, I knew that this ship more than any other would be easily led.

Replace the term “King” with “Narrator”, and “Pawn” with “Sailor”.