Spring came to Frostfall late, as it always did in the north.
It arrived without drama, the way things came to Elowen now, the ice at the courtyard's edges thinning, the silverwood forest releasing its held white in slow degrees, the eternal northern wind carrying, for the first time in months, something that was not purely cold but slightly, undeniably, warmer.
She was in the garden on the citadel's eastern side when she noticed it.
Not a garden in the formal sense, there had been one once, a precisely maintained showcase of cultivated perfection, everything arranged to convey the appropriate image of Luna's domestic grace. She had had it turned over. The formal plantings were replaced with the kind of growth that served actual purpose, medicinal herbs for Moonhaven, the varieties that
