LYSSARA
The ordinary governance week arrived without announcement, the way ordinary things arrived when the extraordinary had finished, requiring everything available, having stepped back, and allowing the ordinary to resume its correct function.
I had been waiting for it.
Not impatiently, with the specific anticipation of a woman who had understood since the morning on the cold floor in Ironveil that the ordinary morning was one of the things she was building toward and who had been building toward it across eleven months of everything that was not ordinary and who was now inside it and finding that it was exactly what she had understood it would be.
It fit.
The governance week had the specific texture of sovereignty when it was not in crisis, and I was learning that texture the way
