The steward's name was Aldric, he was the most exhausted person Lira had ever met.
Not physically — he was trim, upright, moving through the Shadow Court's upper corridors with the precise economy of someone who had spent decades ensuring that every step had a destination and arrived there on schedule.
The exhaustion was deeper than physical. It lived in the careful way he held his expression neutral when she asked questions, in the microscopic pause before he answered anything she said, in the specific quality of his silence when she touched the wrong fork at breakfast — not the corrective silence of a teacher but the suffering silence of a man who had been asked to perform a miracle on a timeline.
She liked him immediately.
"The court takes its evening meal at th
