The word had lived in her periphery her entire life.
Not spoken — overheard. Half-sentences in market taverns that stopped when she walked too close.
A historian's drunk monologue was cut short by a hand on his shoulder and a warning look from someone who knew better.
A merchant at the Veil Market who had looked at her collarbone on a hot day when her shirt had slipped and looked away so quickly the speed of it was its own kind of information.
She had collected these fragments the way she collected everything — quietly, without appearing to, filed under things that might matter and left there because examining them too closely felt like standing at the edge of something with no visible bottom.
She was standing at that edge now.
"Tell me what it actually i
