Seraphine came in the late afternoon.
Not the early morning, which was when she usually came if something needed to be said quietly, before the house was fully awake. The late afternoon had a different quality, the day already spent, the light going gold and low through the Citadel windows, the particular hour when things felt closer to their actual size than they did in the sharp clarity of morning.
Aelara was in the sitting room with a book she had not been reading for the past twenty minutes.
She had been looking at the window instead, at the courtyard going gold outside it, thinking about nothing in particular, which was something she was still learning to do without guilt, the specific practice of sitting in a room with nothing required of the hour and letting the hour be what it was.
She heard Seraphine's footsteps in the corridor.
