The Outcasts by John Flanagan Page B

stroke of luck the previous summer.
    When he had turned thirteen, he applied for a job at Anders’ boatyard.
    Anders was an irascible, middle-aged man who was generally intolerant of teenage boys. He considered them to be flighty and unreliable. But he saw that Hal was different from the general run of boys in Hallasholm so, with some misgivings, he agreed to give the boy a trial. It didn’t take him long to see that Hal was a skilled and meticulous worker. His attention to detail and the precision of his work was impressive in one so young and Anders hired him immediately. Hal took to spending most of his spare time in the boatyard.
    Two years after Hal came to work for him, Anders took on a commission from Gunter Moonstalker, a retired sea wolf. Gunter, too old and arthritic now to serve on a wolfship, still yearned for the old days and wanted a boat for cruising. He stipulated a boat that would be similar in lines to a wolfship, but small enough that he and a few friends could handle it. Anders drew up a plan, aided by Hal, who was fascinated by the project. Over the winter months, they worked indoors in the boatyard workshop, carving the prow and stern pieces, splitting logs to form the planks, shaping the frames for the hull and selecting a section of timber for the keel. As the materials were made ready, they were stacked along one side of the boat shed in a steadily growing pile of finished components. Then, unexpectedly, Gunter Moonstalker died.
    Anders was faced with a problem. The boat had been specifically designed to Gunter’s requirements. It was too narrow in the beam for a fishing boat and too small to be a trader. It was not a boat that Anders would be able to sell easily, and in the meantime, the frames and planks and spars were taking up valuable room in his workshop.
    Hal solved the problem for him.
    “I’ll buy it,” he said. It had long been his ambition to have a boat of his own and he had saved virtually every kroner Anders had paid him against the prospect of buying one. This seemed like too good a chance to miss. They negotiated a fair price—Anders had already received half the agreed fee from Gunter, after all—and the boat was Hal’s. Anders added one stipulation.
    “You’ll have to move it out,” he said. “I can’t have it taking up room here.”
    Hal agreed readily, and he had enlisted Stig and Thorn to help him move the boat to the ramshackle jetty at Bearclaw Creek.
    Knowing that when the boat was complete he would need a crew, he had also approached three other boys to help.
    Ulf and Wulf were identical twins. Nobody could tell them apart, not even their mother, and that made other boys wary of them. In addition, they traded on the fact that nobody could identify them, often swapping identities at will to confuse people. Hal had always believed that twins had a special bond between them, but Ulf and Wulf seemed to be exceptions to this rule. They fought all the time, like cat and dog—or rather, as Thorn once said, like cat and cat.
    Ingvar helped as well. He was a massively built boy whose muscles were greatly appreciated when it came to moving the heavier items, such as the bags of river stones that would be used for balance.
    Ingvar would have had the makings of a mighty warrior, except for one failing. His eyesight was so poor that he could barely see details past a meter away. The prospect of going into battle beside Ingvar was a daunting one. Once the battle began, there was no way he would be able to distinguish friend from foe. He would be just as likely to decimate his allies as his enemies. But he was a good-natured boy, philosophical about his disability and always willing to help. And when it came to carrying heavy weights over long distances, he had no peer.
    As the summer wore on, the boat had taken shape. The twins and Ingvar worked on the project from time to time, although they didn’t share the same dedication as Hal and Stig. In Ingvar’s case, it was often