She arrived at two in the morning.
Lena knew this because she was awake — she'd been awake since midnight, in the way she was sometimes awake in the deep hours, when the processing her brain did in sleep overflowed into wakefulness and demanded conscious attention. She'd been at the window watching the garden when the shape appeared at the gate.
Old. She could tell from across the garden, in the near-dark, with only the ambient light of a clear night and the lamp from the front path: old in the specific way she'd read about in her mother's careful not-quite-description of the woman who had come when Lena was six days old.
The seer walked up the path.
She knocked.
Lena was at the door before anyone else stirred — she'd been dressed, she'd known, in the way she was beginning to understa
