Caden came back at dawn.
I was still at Maren's table — the lamp burned low, three books in various states of open around me, Maren herself asleep in the chair by the window with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had done it many times. I had not slept. My mind was too full and too fast, running laps around everything the books had said and everything Maren had explained and the cold signatures in the tree line and the sound that had reached back when I reached outward.
He opened the door quietly and took in the scene — me, the books, the sleeping elder, the lamp — and something in his expression did the thing it did sometimes, the thing I was getting better at reading. A settling. Like the act of finding me where he expected me to be was a tension releasing somewhere he hadn't nam
