There was a particular hour of the spring morning that Elowen had come to love more than any other.
The hour before the citadel fully woke, when the light was coming but not arrived, when the eastern sky was doing something complicated and beautiful above the silverwood forest and the world was in the specific quiet of things that exist between one state and another. She came to the garden in this hour two or three mornings a week and simply stood in it, not tending anything, not working, just being present in the garden and the light and the morning.
Lyra loved this hour.
The wolf was most expansively herself in the early mornings, when the scents of the night were still present and the world had not yet accumulated the day's complexity, and she would press forward in Elowen's chest in
