He watched his hand. It was slender and scaled the same silvery-green as his dragon. He dragged it through the soil and then admitted, ‘She still dreams of captaining Tarman. She loves the ship and she said that if Leftrin doesn’t have a child, or if he dies before his child is ready to captain the ship, she would want to step in.’ He squirmed uncomfortably. ‘I asked her if she couldn’t be an Elderling and a liveship captain, and she said—’

‘Tarman would hate it. As would Arbuc.’ To his unwilling nod, Malta added, ‘Dragons in any form are jealous creatures, Alum. You have given your life over to one, and with it, you have surrendered many choices …’

‘Arbuc is worth it!’ he declared before she could say more.

‘I am sure he is, to you,’ Malta went on implacably. ‘And Skelly might say the same about Tarman. Would you leave Arbuc to follow Skelly to a life on the river with her liveship?’

The look on his face confirmed for her that he had never even considered such a choice. ‘Don’t rush her,’ Malta suggested quietly. ‘As you have said, you have scores of years before you. Possibly hundreds. You have more time to wait than she does to decide. If she waits ten years to decide, will you no longer want her? And if that is true, if she became an Elderling for you, would you still want her in ten years? Do not be too hasty to cut her off from what she has in favour of what you think you could make of her.’

His mouth had gone flat and there was a resentful sadness in his eyes that had not been there before. Malta tried not to regret that she had put it there.

‘I know you are right, Elderling Queen,’ he said huskily. ‘I was afraid to consult you, without knowing why. Well, now I do. I was going to ask you if I should request this of my dragon when he returns. I was going to ask if you had ever resented sharing Tintaglia.’ He shook his head at himself. ‘It’s not my choice, is it?’

Malta shook her head slowly.

He stood up and then bowed to her gravely. She thought of telling him she was not Queen of anything, and then decided that, for now, perhaps it hurt nothing if he thought of her that way. He turned to go, and then suddenly halted. He reached into a pouch at his hip.

‘Carson and I hiked up into the hills. It’s spring up there. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The ground is dry and you can walk over it, and plants cover it everywhere. I thought I understood dry land after being here most of winter, but …’ He shook his head in wonder at it. ‘Carson found these and gathered them. He said we should give them to you, since you were spending so much time in the hothouses.’

From his pouch, he took a small prickly branch. Shrivelled brown husks clung to the end of it. ‘Rose hips,’ said Malta. ‘From wild roses.’

‘Yes! That’s what he said, too. He said you might want to try planting them.’

She took them from him and looked at them in her palm. Three shrivelled rose hips. She turned and looked back at the scores of empty gardening beds. ‘It’s a start,’ she said, and smiled at him.

‘A start,’ he agreed.

It had become almost a ritual for her. Every evening before the sun went down, Thymara climbed the map tower and looked out.

It was a different place compared to the first time she had seen it. She had spent a day helping Alise clean all the windows, inside and out. Alise had been very unhappy with the crude piece of scraped leather that covered the broken pane, but Carson had apologetically assured her it was the best he could do. It kept out the wind and rain.

The table he had devised to support the ancient map that had fallen to the floor was likewise rough, but at least it raised the map out of danger from errant feet. The long-ago fall had cracked it and parts of it had crumbled, but it was correctly oriented to the city and it had been useful to the keepers any number of times. Carson never seemed to tire of studying it, and repeatedly insisted that it was capable of telling them far more than they were capable of asking of it. Thymara had dismissed that possibility. She climbed the endless stairs, not for the map but for the view.

She stared out over the ever-changing terrain. The sere grasses of the wild meadows beyond the city had gone green. The forested hills had taken on new colours as trees leafed out. Even the colour of the river seemed different; it was certainly not the chalky grey of the Rain Wild River that she had known. Here it appeared a silvery brown between verdant banks.

But it was the sky she scanned, looking for signs of returning dragons each evening.

She heard the scuff of feet on the stone steps and turned to see Tats emerge from the stair. ‘See anything?’ he greeted her.