Lena's POV
The council reconvened the following morning, and this time the room was fuller than it had been the day before, word having spread that something significant was about to be settled.
Bastian had confirmed the censure record overnight. It was real, properly filed, never formally lifted by the Veranox council. The legal advisor, a precise, gray haired man named Corwin who had clearly spent a sleepless night reviewing his own oversight, presented the finding to the room with the careful, slightly chastened tone of a man correcting his own error in public.
Cassian sat at the far end of the table while it was read aloud. I watched her face carefully, the way I had been watching it since the library, and I saw the moment the calculation behind her eyes completed and arrived at the
