Sera's POV
The morning after the envoy leaves for the second time, I wake up wanting something to do with my hands.
It isn't restless exactly, though it might look like that from the outside. It's closer to the feeling I used to get in Asheville's kitchens, on the rare mornings nobody needed me to be quiet or careful or invisible when I could just work and the work itself was enough. I go looking for that feeling now the same way you go looking for an old friend you didn't realise you'd missed.
I find it in the healer's cabin first, tucked at the edge of the training yard, where an older woman named Odessa is elbow-deep in dried herbs, muttering about a shipment of bandaging cloth that hasn't arrived yet. She looks up when I knock on the open doorframe, sizing me up the way everyone in
