17
Liadan
She did not sleep.
She had known before she reached her chamber door that she was not going to sleep, and she had not pretended otherwise — had gone directly to the small table by the window, sat down in the dark, and let the thing she was carrying settle into the room around her rather than trying to compress it into the dimensions of something she could manage before lying down.
It needed room. She gave it room.
She had been hurt before. She understood the specific texture of this kind of damage — the damage that came from people who loved you and still made decisions for you in the name of that love, who withheld the things that were yours to hold because they had decided, in the privacy of their own fear, that the cost of giving them was too high. She had named the patte
