Aria.
A week passed.
Maybe longer. Time moved differently here. No palace bells, no gathering fires, no rotation of guards to mark the hours by.
Just morning training and evening conversations with Dorin and the long quiet stretches in between where I sat in my room and pressed against the wall in my head and came back with nothing.
The training helped.
That surprised me. I had expected it to feel foreign, something being put into me from outside. Instead it felt like the opposite.
"You were always like this," Dorin said one evening. We were sitting in the main room of the compound, a larger space than mine, with a fire and a table and the first window I had access to. Outside was dark and the wind was doing something to the trees. "Even as a small child. You learned things once and
