The morning was ordinary.
That was the part Corin would remember later, when he was trying to piece it back together — that it had been an utterly, absolutely ordinary morning. The kind of morning that had no business holding what it ended up holding.
A square of pale spring sun lay across the dark wood of his desk. The window was cracked open an inch, letting in the cool smell of the orchard below and the distant, irregular clang of someone working at the forge across the yard. Somewhere in the rafters of the old packhouse, two sparrows were having a small disagreement.
Corin was sitting at his desk in his shirt-sleeves, his collar undone, a tiny silver-handled screwdriver pinched between two fingers.
He was fixing the strap of his watch.
It was a stupid, fiddly little job. The pin t
