Lena's POV
Tara's messages arrived every few days, written in the dense, efficient script of a woman who had things to say and limited paper to say them on.
The early ones covered practical information: how things had shifted in Crestfall after the departure, which families had aligned with which positions in the aftermath of Marcus Cole's rank review, what the general talk was about the Stormridge alliance and whether people believed it would hold. She had opinions about all of it and she did not conceal them. Tara's correspondence was one of the few places in my life where the full, unfiltered version of a person's thinking arrived without architectural management, and I had always valued it for that.
The later messages were different.
She had been watching Sienna and Zack.
She wrot
