‘You look tired,’ she said contritely. ‘But I wanted to see you because we will be leaving tomorrow morning as well, and I feared that I might not have another chance to say goodbye.’

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I had not realised you meant to go so soon.’ I made a mental note to let Sarn know before I slept that the Norselanders were leaving the next day. Then I got out the little comb I had set aside to give her as a gift. She exclaimed over it with delight and admired the cloak pin I had chosen from my jewellery for the shadow Ursa, who had set herself before me, offering her life as a shield when we had faced the Hedra on Herder Isle. Then I asked whom they would travel with down to Sutrium.

‘Some of the coercer-knights will go with us and also the same armsmen of High Chieftain Dardelan’s who escorted us up here.’

I nodded my approval. ‘I am so glad you came, though you were not able to stay long. It is a pity I did not bring a jug of something for us to drink a farewell toast.’

‘But we have something!’ She pointed to a tray set on the mantelshelf. ‘The girl that bade me come up here sent it a little while later. There are sweet buns and hot mulled ferment, although I fear they might be cold by now,’ she added regretfully.

It was nothing to tip the ferment into a pot and heat it. When it was steaming I poured two mugs and we each took a sweet bun. As we ate in companionable silence, I thought how pleasant it was to sit and eat and drink with someone who liked me and yet was not in awe of me. And Cinda had a calm, restful manner that seemed to soothe all of my anxieties. I thought how Maruman would have liked her, and regretted that they would never meet. From the cat my thoughts turned inevitably to Dragon, as I wondered yet again where she was.

‘She is a beautiful child for all her rags and dirt,’ Cinda’s image said, and I saw that she had taken a memory of Dragon from my thoughts and reproduced her within the imagined turret room. I gazed at her bedraggled form with mingled regret and frustration.

‘That is how she looked when first I met her,’ I said, then I altered her image so that she looked as she had done the last time I had seen her, when I left her with the healer Kella, to travel to Saithwold.

‘Is she truly queen of the Red Land?’ Cinda asked.