I found out at breakfast.
Not from being told. That was never how I found things out in this house. I found out from the quality of the morning, from the specific atmospheric texture of a pack house that had received information overnight and was processing it in the particular collective way of a group of people who all knew the same thing and were all deciding, separately and without coordinating, how to hold it.
The dining room was quieter than usual.
Not the managed social quiet of people being careful. The genuine quiet of people who had something on their minds that was taking up the space that conversation usually occupied. Pack members ate with the focused attention of people whose thoughts were elsewhere. The senior warriors who usually talked across the table in the easy short
