The days that followed had a quality she had not expected.
She had expected — given the urgency of the situation, the Council's message, the six-to-eight-week window, Mourne's regrouping somewhere to the east — she had expected the days to feel pressed, urgent, the specific breathless quality of time that is being used against you. Instead they had a different texture. Dense. Accumulative. Like weather building toward something rather than already upon you.
She and Thessaly worked every morning. The training had a different quality now that the wolf aspect had arrived — she could access the disciplines faster, hold them longer, move between them with a fluency that had not been available before. Earth-connection was nearly automatic. Thread-reading was becoming conversational — she could
