Twenty three minutes after Lucien calls Reth and the gate opens, a set of footsteps crosses the courtyard.
I know this because Reth messages: She came through. And then, a minute later: She is standing in the courtyard. She is not moving.
The specific quality of someone who has made the first decision to come through the gate and is now making the second one. The compound's courtyard is its own threshold. Everyone who has arrived here has had a moment in it, the moment before the ground is fully claimed, when the decision is still being made even though the gate is behind you.
Lucien reads the messages.
He looks at Gregor.
Gregor is very still with the stillness that is his specific version of a significant thing arriving.
"Twenty years," Lucien says.
"Yes," Gregor says.
"She kept
