Lenora's POV
Six weeks after the capital hearing, a second letter arrived from Marcelline.
This one was addressed to me.
I took it to the bridge, which was where I did my difficult reading. The river was full with autumn rain. The mist was heavy.
The letter was longer than the first. The prose was the same — considered, precise, the voice of someone composing carefully. But the content was different.
She wrote about the prophecy.
She had first encountered it, she said, when she was nineteen — a young guard officer reading through the restricted archive of the territory she'd been assigned to. The prophecy had been in a sealed file. She had read it once and spent a week unable to stop thinking about it.
It described, she wrote, the end of the authority structures I had been working t
