She did not sleep well.
Not because of fear. That distinction mattered to her and she held it clearly as she lay on the plain bed in the eastern wing with the mountain a dark shape against the pre-dawn sky outside her window. She had been afraid before, in this citadel, in its perfect rooms and its managed silences. She knew what fear felt like in her body, the way it narrowed her breathing and made her hands careful and turned her eyes downward. This was not that.
This was the particular restlessness of a person standing at the edge of an irrevocable thing and choosing not to step back from it.
Tomorrow the assembly would convene.
Tomorrow she would stand in a room full of people who had built their understanding of her around an image she had spent months systematically destroying, a
