It snowed the night before the substantive hearing.
Not heavily — just enough to cover the northern road in a thin, even layer that the horses' hooves broke through with each step, the sound of it particular and specific in the cold morning air. We rode to Harrow's Keep in the early light with our breath visible and the forest on either side of the road carrying the particular stillness of a landscape that has just been quietly transformed.
Kaden rode beside me.
Cael and Advocate Renne rode slightly behind, deep in a final pre-hearing review that I could catch fragments of when the wind shifted — procedure, evidence order, the quantification methodology brief, the new Petra correspondence that Advocate Renne had incorporated into a supplementary submission filed with the panel forty-eig
