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At night, watchmen patrolled, keeping the lanterns on the staircases and bridges filled and alight.

Night brought a festive air, as the city bloomed in necklaces of light.

The Rain Wild Folk gardened in hammocks and troughs of earth suspended in the trees.

Foragers had their own pathways through the trees and over the swamplands.

They harvested the exotic fruits, flowers and game-birds of the Rain Wild jungle.

Water came from the sprawling system of rain catchers, for no one could drink much of the river water and hope to live.

The thick boats, hollowed out from green tree trunks, were pulled out of the river each night and hammocked in the trees.

They were the temporary transportation between the ‘houses’, supplements to the swaying bridges and pulley carts that linked the trees.

The trees supported the whole city. A quake that caused the wet ground below to bubble and gape did no more than make the great trees sway gently.

Below, on the true ground, there was the ancient city, of course, but from Selden’s description, it was little more than a hump in the swampland.

The little bit of solid ground around it was devoted to the workshops for salvage and exploration of the city.

No one lived there. When she had asked Selden why, he had shrugged.

‘You go crazy if you spend too much time in the city.’ Then he had cocked his head and added, ‘Wilee says that Reyn might be crazy already. Before he started liking you, he spent more time down there than anyone else ever had. He nearly got the ghost disease.’ He had glanced about.

‘That’s what killed his father, you know,’ he’d added in a hoarse whisper.

‘What’s the ghost disease?’ she had asked him, intrigued in spite of herself.

‘I don’t know. Not exactly. You drown in memories. That’s what Wilee said. What’s that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ His newly discovered ability to ask questions was almost worse than his former long silences had been.

She stretched where she lay on the divan, then curled back into her coverlet. The ghost disease. Drowning in memories. She shook her head and closed her eyes.

Another scratch came at the door. She did not reply.

She kept still and made her breathing deep and slow.

She heard the door rasp open. Someone came into her room.

Someone came close to the bed and looked down on her.

The person just stood over her, watching her feign sleep.

Malta kept her pretence and waited for the intruder to leave.

Instead, a gloved hand touched her face.

Her eyes flew open. A veiled man stood by her. He was dressed completely in dull black.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ She shrank back from his touch, clutching the coverlet.

‘It’s me. Reyn. I had to see you.’ He dared to sit down on the divan’s edge.

She drew her feet up to avoid any contact with him. ‘You know I don’t want to see you.’

‘I know that,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But we don’t always get what we want, do we?’

‘You seem to,’ she responded bitterly.

He stood up with a sigh.

‘I have told you. And I have written it to you, in all the letters you’ve returned to me.

I spoke in desperation that day. I would have said anything to get you to go with me.

Nevertheless, I do not intend to enforce the liveship contract between our families.

I will not take you as payment for a debt, Malta Haven.

I would not have you against your will.’

‘Yet here I am,’ she pointed out tartly.

‘Alive,’ he added.

‘Small thanks to the men you sent after the Satrap,’ she pointed out acidly. ‘They left me to die.’

‘I didn’t know you’d be in the coach.’ His voice was stiff as he offered the excuse.

‘If you had trusted me enough to tell me the truth at the Ball, I wouldn’t have been.

Nor my mother, grandmother or brother. Your distrust of me nearly killed us all.

It did kill Davad Restart, who was guilty of no more than being greedy and stupid.

If I had died, you would have been the one guilty of my death.

Perhaps you saved my life, but it was only after you had nearly taken it from me.

Because you didn’t trust me.’ These were the words she had longed to fling at him since she had pieced that last evening together.

This was the knowledge that had turned her soul to stone.

She had rehearsed the words so often, yet never truly known how deep her hurt was until she uttered them aloud.

She could scarcely get them past the lump in her throat.

He was silent, standing over her still. She watched the impassive drapery across his face and wondered if he felt anything at all.

She heard him catch his breath. Silence.

Again the ragged intake of air. Slowly he sank down to his knees.

She watched without comprehension as he knelt on the floor by her bed.

The words flooded out of him. His voice was so choked she could scarcely understand them.

‘I know that it’s my fault. I knew it through all the nights when you lay here, unstirring.

It ate at me like river water cuts into a dying tree.

I nearly killed you. The thought of you, lying there, bleeding and alone…

I’d give anything to undo it. I was stupid and I was wrong.

I have no right to ask it, but I beg it of you.

Please forgive me. Please.’ His voice broke on an audible sob.

His hands came up to clench into fists against his veil.

Both her hands flew up to cover her mouth.

In shock, she watched his shoulders shake.

He was weeping. She spoke her astonished thought aloud.

‘I never heard a man say such words. I didn’t think one could.

’ In one shattering instant, her basic concept of men was reordered.

She didn’t have to hammer Reyn with words or break him with unflinching accusations.

He could admit he was wrong. Not like my father, the traitor thought whispered. She refused to follow it.

‘Malta?’ His voice was thick with tears. He still knelt before her.

‘Oh, Reyn. Please get up.’ It was too unsettling to see him this way.

‘But —’

She astonished herself. ‘I forgive you. It was a mistake.’ She had never known those words could be so easy to say.

She didn’t have to hold it back. She could let it go.

She didn’t have to save his guilt up to club him with later, when she wanted something from him.

Maybe they would never do that to each other.

Maybe it wouldn’t be about who was wrong or right, or who controlled whom.

So what would it be about, between them?

He slowly came to his feet. He turned his back to her, lifted his veil and dragged his sleeve across his eyes like a child, before finding his handkerchief. He wiped his eyes. She heard him take a deep breath.

Quietly, she tested this new idea. ‘You would not stop me if I chose to return to Bingtown today?’

He shrugged, still not facing her. ‘I would not have to. The Kendry doesn’t sail until tomorrow night.’ His effort at levity failed him. He added miserably as he turned back to her, ‘You could go then, if you insisted. It’s the only way back to Bingtown, or what’s left of it.’

She sat up slowly. The question broke from her. ‘Have you had news of Bingtown? Of my home and grandmother?’

He shook his head as he sat down beside her.

‘I’m sorry. No. There are not many message birds, and all are used for news of the war.

’ Reluctantly, he added, ‘There are many stories of pillaging. The New Traders rose up. Some of their slaves fight beside them. Others have crossed over to side with the Bingtown Traders. It is neighbour against neighbour in Bingtown, the ugliest kind of fighting, for they know one another’s weaknesses best. In such battles, there are always some who take no side, but loot and plunder whoever is weakest. Your mother hopes that your grandmother fled to her little farm as she had intended.

She would be safer there. The Old Trader estates are ’

‘Stop. I don’t want to hear of it, I don’t want to think of it.

’ She clapped her hands over her ears and huddled into a ball, her eyes tight shut.

Home had to exist. Somewhere there had to be a place with solid walls and safe routine.

Her breath came fast and hard. She recalled little of her flight from Bingtown.

Everything had hurt so much, and when she had tried to see, images were doubled and tripled upon one another.

The horse had been rough paced, and Reyn had held her in front of him.

They had ridden too fast, too hard. There was thick smoke in the air, and distant screams and shouts.

Some of the roads had been blocked by fallen debris from burning buildings.

All the docks in the harbour had been charred and smoking wreckage.

Reyn had found a leaky boat. Selden had held her upright, while Reyn and her mother plied the worm-eaten oars to get them out to the Kendry…

She found she was in his lap, still huddled in a ball.

He sat on the bed, holding her and rocking her as he patted her back slowly.

He had tucked her head under his chin. ‘Hush, hush, it’s all done, it’s all over,’ he kept saying.

His arms were strong around her. Home was gone.

This was the only safe place left, but his words were too true to comfort her.

It was all done, it was all over, it was all ruined.

Too late to try harder, too late to even weep over it.

Too late for everything. She curled tighter into him and put her arms around him. She held him tightly.

‘I don’t want to think anymore. I don’t want to talk anymore.’

‘Me, neither.’ Her head was against his chest. His words thrummed deep inside him.