جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 80

AnaraWe left Nightveil on a Thursday morning.It was ordinary weather. The kind of grey that was not committed to being anything specific, not rain and not sun, just a quiet overcast that made everything look slightly more considered than it actually was. My father stood at the top of the steps again the way he had when we arrived, but the formal clothes were gone and he looked smaller without them, which I was beginning to understand was not a new thing but something I was only now able to see.We did not say much to each other.He was not a man built for the kind of conversation we needed and I was not yet a person who required it from him. There was a version of this story where I stood on those steps and made him account for every year of what he had done and I looked at that version and understood I could access it if I wanted to.I didn't want to. Not today."Anara," he said, when I was almost at the car.I turned.He was looking at me with an expression that had no name I knew

KaelenThree weeks after the throne room, the first letter arrived from Lyra.Not to me. To Anara. Left with the morning correspondence in a plain envelope with Nightveil's seal and Lyra's handwriting on the outside. Anara picked it up from the breakfast table and turned it over in her hands twice before she opened it, and I watched her face while she read it and understood from the quality of her stillness that whatever it said was not what she had expected."She wants to learn," Anara said. She set the letter on the table and looked at it. "About the power. What it is and how it works and how to use it without it using her." A pause. "She's asking me to teach her."I thought about this. "And?""And I think I'm going to say yes," Anara said. She picked up her tea. "Not yet. Not this week or next week. She needs more time and so do I." She looked at me across the table. "But eventually.""Okay," I said."You're not going to argue with me.""Why would I argue with you about your sister

AnaraThe letter I wrote to Lyra took four drafts.Not because I didn't know what to say. I knew exactly what to say. The problem was that every version I wrote came out sounding like one of two things — either too careful, the kind of careful that communicated I was still afraid of her, or too warm, the kind of warmth that skipped over everything that had actually happened between us and landed somewhere dishonest.I threw the third draft into the fire in the sitting room and watched it catch and Kaelen looked up from his papers across the room and said nothing, which was the correct response.The fourth draft was short. Three paragraphs. I told her I would come at the end of the month. I told her to rest and to stop trying to direct her power until I arrived because unsupervised practice at this stage would make things worse. I told her that what happened in the throne room was a beginning and not an ending, and that I did not know exactly what that meant yet for either of us but I

AnaraI couldn't sleep the night before we left for Nightveil.Not the anxious, circling insomnia of someone dreading something. Something more specific than that. A restlessness that had no clean object, just a general aliveness, the feeling of being very awake in a body that had been through too much to settle easily anymore.I got up at two in the morning and went to the kitchen and made tea and sat at the long wooden table where the kitchen staff ate their meals and drank it in the quiet and thought about nothing in particular for a while.Seraphis was awake too."Nervous?" she asked."No," I said. Then, more honestly, "Maybe a little.""About Lyra or your father?""Both," I said. "Neither, really. More about." I paused. "More about whether what happened in the throne room holds. Whether what I felt change in her actually changed or whether I am hoping too hard.""You felt it," Seraphis said. "The balance settling between you. That was real.""I know it was real in that moment," I

AnaraWe stayed in Nightveil for three days.The first day was Lyra. The second day was my father and the conversation about Riven's investigation and the account that had been used in his name. That conversation was harder than the one with Lyra, not because my father was cruel about it but because he was not. He sat across from me in the same reading room where he had once told me that a dead woman's ghost had more claim on this pack than I did, and he listened to what I told him and his face did things I had never seen it do and when I finished he was quiet for a long time."She used my name," he said."Yes," I said."To kill a man.""Yes."He looked at the window. "I gave her everything she asked for," he said. Not defensively. The dull, factual quality of a man reviewing a ledger. "Every resource, every advantage, every freedom. I gave her everything I denied you and she used it to become something I don't entirely recognize.""She became something the power made her," I said. "W