Snow came to Frostfall Citadel in the way it always did, which was to say without announcement and without apology, arriving overnight and covering the silverwood forest and the courtyard stones and the outer walls in the white that gave the place its true character. The northern wind that moved through it carried no aggression this time of year. Just constant. The particular steadiness of a cold that had been here long before the citadel was built and would be here long after.
Elowen stood at her window in the early morning and watched it.
She had come to have a relationship with the morning that she had not previously possessed. In the old life of the citadel, mornings had been the beginning of management, the moment when the day's performance schedule was assembled and the face arrang
