“Oh, no!” she cried and pulled a tattered kerchief from her pocket. She dabbed at her face. “Is it gone now?”

“Most of it,” he told her, taking her hand. Still such a fine lady she was, to worry about something as trivial as a bit of ink smeared on her face. He loved it. “I see you’ve added some more pages to your stack. Did you get his entire story, then?”

“I got a summary of what happened to him, and how they found us again.” She smiled and shook her head in wonder. “These youngsters take so much in stride. He sees nothing extraordinary in that he found a place where sheep or goats were running wild, near what had to have been an ancient Elderling dwelling. He doesn’t even consider what it means that he found land, dry land suitable for pasturing livestock, right there on the Rain Wild River. Do you know what that would mean to Trehaug or Cassarick? The possibility of raising meat! Perhaps even sheep for wool. And he shrugs it off as an interesting spot with a ‘get-warm’ place for his dragon.”

“Well. I’ll agree that is a big discovery, one that is likely to remain undiscovered again for almost as long as it has been.”

“Not when the dragons start flying,” she said, and then, to his shock, sprang at him and trapped him in a hug. “Leftrin, you’ll never guess what Rapskal told me! He said he’d ask Heeby to carry me across to the main part of Kelsingra, so I can walk the streets there as long as I want!”

He felt almost hurt at her excitement. “But I told you I’d get you there! There’s just no safe place for Tarman to put in along the bank right now. But maybe tomorrow, the barge could take us most of the way across, and then we could cover the rest of the distance in a small boat. And Tarman could come fetch us back in the afternoon. There’s just no way for him to stay there. Water’s too deep for the poles, and while he can move the barge against a slow current in shallow water, deep swift water is too hard for him.”

“Tomorrow! We could do that tomorrow? Together?”

Had she heard a word he’d said? “Yes, my dear. Of course we could. It’s only the barge that can’t safely put in on that shore. And in the future, when the docks there are restored, that won’t be a problem.”