Sebastian's POV
The morning we were to go to the sage, I woke before dawn to find Mira outside my study door.
She would not normally come to me directly.
Mira operated through quiet channels and careful timing and the particular diplomacy of someone who had learned to navigate a hierarchy from the bottom of it. When she came to me directly it was because something had happened that could not wait for the usual routes. I looked at her face in the grey light of the early morning and I already knew before she spoke that the news was the kind that made the decision to go to the sage feel less like a choice and more like a deadline.
"Fen," she said. Fen, the young border wolf who had been injured in the rogue attack three nights ago, the one I had checked myself and declared healing on sche
