19
Liadan
Three nights before the confrontation, she went to him.
Not because the plan required it. Not because the Nasc was pulling or the stone was calling or the four-day window had narrowed to three and the weight of the remaining time was pressing. She went because she had been carrying a decision for twenty-three days — had been walking toward it since the morning she sat in the lore-hall with Gormlaith's tea and the full release condition in her hands — and she had run out of reasons to put it off that were honest.
She had been afraid. She could name that now with the clean precision she brought to everything she needed to understand: afraid that what she felt was the Nasc's manufacture and not her own, afraid that she had built a version of him that was more consistent than the
