Lira read her mother’s journal standing up, because sitting down felt like something she might not recover from.
The handwriting was small and careful, the kind of writing produced by someone who had been taught that ink was expensive and paper was not to be wasted. Naia wrote in short entries, some only a few lines long, others filling an entire page, but the dates were inconsistent. Some entries were days apart, while others were separated by months. The journal was not a diary in the traditional sense. It was more like a collection of moments that Naia had needed to put somewhere outside her own head, things too heavy to carry alone, but also too dangerous to speak out loud.
The first entry was the one Lira had already read. “I arrived at Ravencrest today. They do not know what I am,
