March arrived, and the snow began to let go.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. The way snow left when winter had been long and real, retreating from the edges first, the south-facing walls and the stones that caught the afternoon light, pulling back incrementally until one morning you looked at the grounds. There was more brown than white, and the change had happened without a single moment you could point to as the moment.
Eli tracked it.
Of course he did.
He had a system involving a stick that he had placed at the edge of the snow line in the east courtyard, with marks on the stick indicating where the line had been on each previous day. He checked it every morning before breakfast with the focused attention of a scientist monitoring an experiment and reported the findings at the ta
