tamaranth | 2024/057: Traveller's Joy

2024/057: Traveller's Joy — Victoria Goddard

(Hal should, perhaps, have asked more questions, but he was a gardener: he planted seeds, and waited for them to grow. He could have asked more questions, and perhaps a few things would have been very different as a result. But he was not wrong to wait for what came from the seeds planted in hope, either.) [loc. 544]

A novella, possibly a short story, set before the main sequence of Greenwing and Dart novels, and told from the viewpoint of Hal, who has not yet revealed to his friend Jemis Greenwing that he is an Imperial Duke. (For that matter, their friend Marcan has not yet 'fessed up to being the second son of the King of Lind.) The three set off on a walking tour after the appalling finale of Jemis' time at Morrowlea University: not much happens, but there is friendship and comfort, some intriguing foreshadowing, and plenty of botanising. This was a delight, albeit a brief one, and prompted me to reread the entire Greenwing and Dart saga...