She said something to him quietly. He answered the same way. Neither of them looked my direction.
I looked at my own hands on the table.
The mark was gone — healed over completely since the break, the skin clean, and what I'd expected to feel like absence felt, increasingly, like room. Space where there'd been weight for nineteen years, now just mine.
Ryke came back in.
He sat down across from me. His face had the quality it got after important conversations — not smoothed over, present. Whatever the call had contained was visible in the set of it.
"What did he say," I said.
"He said he made a decision and he made it because it was the right one." Ryke looked at his hands for a moment. "Then he said my mother would have found Edric Castell insufferable. Specifically." The almost-smil
