Aria.
Three days passed.
I knew because Dorin told me. There were no windows in the room they had given me — a small space off the main corridor of wherever we were, with a cot and a lamp and a wooden chest of clothes that fit me well enough that someone had planned for my arrival. I slept and woke and slept again and measured time by when Dorin came and went.
He came often.
Every morning without fail. Sometimes in the evening too. He would sit across from me in the chair he had carried into the room and talk and I would listen and try to find somewhere inside myself to put the things he said.
Nothing stuck the way memory was supposed to stick.
But it accumulated.
My mother's name had been Sera, he said.
She had been beautiful. Long red hair — I had her colouring, he said, looking
