Seraphine's POV
His letter arrives at dawn and I do not open it until I have run the morning council.
This is a decision. I make it the moment I see the plain parchment in the bundle, the same way I have made a hundred small decisions about him in the past three days, each one a small act of governance over a thing that is increasingly ungovernable. I will not open his letter and then walk into a room full of my senior wolves with whatever it does to me still on my face. So I leave it on the desk, sealed, and I feel it there through the entire council session, a small warm weight in the corner of the room that I do not look at and am aware of continuously.
Coren has theories about the assembly.
Coren always has theories. He has been my senior hawk for forty years and his entire underst
