Traveller's Joy: Greenwing & Dart

By Victoria Goddard

Hal's university career ends quite satisfactorily for himself, but with heartbreak, drama, and painful ignominy for his best friend Jemis. Nevertheless, Hal stood with Jemis when academic argument turned violent, and he'll stand with him now as he finds his feet again ...

 

Traveller's Joy is set after Clary Sage and before the beginning of Stargazy Pie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Goddard
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781998133161

Victoria Goddard

Victoria Goddard is a fantasy novelist, gardener, and occasional academic. She has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, has walked down the length of England, and  is currently a writer, cheesemonger, and gardener in the Canadian Maritimes. Along with cheese, books, and flowers she also loves dogs, tea, and languages.

Book preview

1

The door to the infirmary closed quietly behind the nurse, and Hal finally let himself relax.

Not that Jemis, who was out cold under the nurse’s potent sleeping medication, would have cared in the least that Hal lost his composure, but—well, Hal did. He’d learned to hold himself with rather less rigidity than he’d been accustomed to, before Morrowlea, but always at the back of his mind was the knowledge that he was, regardless of Morrowlea’s egalitarian principles and policies, nevertheless an Imperial Duke.

Very soon now that would come out.

He took a turn around the private room—usually kept for faculty, but under the circumstances given over to poor Jemis—and frowned out the window at the students crossing the quadrangle. It was obvious that the happenings from yesterday’s viva voce examination were the object of much discussion: little knots and clusters of students of all years were forming and dissolving, their robes and hat-ribbons streaming in the day’s brisk breeze.

Fine white clouds piled up, casting scudding shadows over the five great oak trees, the close-cropped lawn, the students. The faculty had withdrawn into their debating chambers, no doubt to discuss the appalling chaos of the end of the previous session.

Hal was still wrestling with his own response. Why had he been the only one to go down, to stand with Jemis? Why had the rest of the watching students been so riled that they resorted to actual violence? Why had the faculty done nothing?

Why had Jemis responded the way he had?

Hal turned to his friend, who lay pale and bruised in the bed. It was a fortunate thing, the nurse had said solemnly, that the voting stones were mere pebbles. She’d been at Morrowlea a long time, and she had assured Hal that it was not the first time stones had been thrown in the examination hall. Not recently, and not very often at fellow students, admittedly, but it was not unknown.

Hal placed that interesting fact into the part of his mind that was forever collecting information on how groups of people worked, and focused more on the present. Namely, that it was his friends and fellows who had responded to an admittedly impressive quarrel between two of their number by stoning his best friend.

He rubbed at his ear, where a stray pebble had stung badly, and considered what he could and should and wanted to do.

It was frustrating beyond all words that what he wanted to do was something he could do—technically, at least—and almost certainly what he should not do.

He wanted to use every resource at his command to ruin Lark.

He was the Imperial Duke of Fillering Pool, though no one but the university chancellor and her assistant (who handled student post in order to maintain their anonymity) knew it. He was the largest landowner in Northwest Oriole. He had many resources he could call on.

He let himself imagine the sweet vindication involved. All the might of great wealth and power and lawyers and soldiers and royal relations and economic sanctions, all of them focused down on⁠—

Unfortunately, that was the problem. All of them focused down on one young woman who had very carefully managed to cause devastating