I read them that night, after the gathering had wound down and Ashveil had settled into its evening rhythms and Sera was asleep with the profound completeness she brought to sleep, as though unconsciousness was another thing she had decided to do thoroughly.
Kael was beside me when I began reading, and somewhere in the third letter he quietly took Sera from her sleeping position and carried her to bed and came back and sat with me without asking how I was or what I was finding because he had learned, across two years of knowing me, that some things were better accompanied than discussed.
The letters were twelve in total, written across a period of several months by a woman whose handwriting carried the specific quality of someone who had lived inside language long enough that writi
