Sera came back from the northern perimeter walk an hour early because the weather had turned, and found the study empty, the nursery empty, the kitchen empty.
She found Darius in the east wing common room, which nobody really used during the day, the light coming in at the low afternoon angle, sitting on the floor with Rowan asleep across his lap.
Not the cross-legged nursey floor posture. The specific, slightly uncomfortable sprawl of someone who had sat down and then not moved for a long time because moving would wake the sleeping child on top of them.
He had a book open on the floor beside him — territorial maps, the kind with the Ledger's expanding network marked in red — but he wasn't reading it. He was looking at the light on the east wall, the way it moved. Just watching it.
He
