Sera's first birthday arrived with the specific quality of a milestone that the people around it had been anticipating differently from the person at its center, who observed the gathering of wolves in Ashveil's great hall with the focused inventory of someone cataloguing information rather than processing celebration.
She sat in my lap through most of it and watched everyone with those clear dark eyes that had been watching everyone since the founding chamber, and periodically she made the small certain sound that I had learned to read as filing complete, which meant she had finished processing whatever she had been observing and was ready for the next thing.
Brek's son had arrived two months earlier, healthy and loud in the specific way that told everyone who heard him that he ha
