Three Days
There was a woman in the northern province whose mother he'd treated the year before his expulsion, who'd written to him once, to the borderlands address a mutual acquaintance had provided, to tell him that her mother had survived a crisis that Soren's treatment in the final month before his expulsion had addressed, and that she thought he should know. He'd never written back, because writing back felt like pulling on a thread he wasn't certain he should pull on, a connection to the kingdom-life that the borderlands had been, for five years, a deliberate departure from. He'd kept the letter, which was its own kind of answer to the question of whether he'd fully departed. Tonight he wrote back. Not because the letter required answering — it was five years old, whatever its information had b
- Writer
