He was exactly where she had expected to find him.
Not in the formal reception halls where the assembly representatives gathered to trade alliances and test each other's positions over ceremonial meals. Not in the strategy rooms where advisors mapped political terrain with the same intensity that soldiers mapped battlefields. Kael Stormrend had always kept his own counsel in his own space, and that space, as Elowen had learned in the months before her departure when she had observed the citadel's political landscape carefully from her quiet corner of it, was the eastern library.
He was at a long table near the window when she entered, a spread of documents before him, a glass of something dark and untouched at his elbow. He was reading with the focused stillness of someone who reads to t
