LYSSARA
It happened on a Wednesday at the low table. Not a sound this time. Not a laugh or a precursor vocalization or any of the things the healer had been cataloguing with the careful attention of a woman who understood she was documenting something the founding era texts had described in theoretical terms and that was now occurring in practical ones.
Zirelle went still. The specific stillness of a wolf, not an infant. The complete arrested quality of a creature that has located something at a frequency below conscious thought and has redirected every available resource toward the locating. I had seen wolves go still this way. I had never seen it in a ten-month-old sitting at a low table with a wooden figure in her lap.
The wooden figure dropped.
She did not notice it drop.
Her atte
