The court was nothing like I had imagined.I had built it up in my mind over the weeks of preparation into something imposing and cold, all stone corridors and formal ceremony and the particular atmosphere of a place designed to remind you of your smallness. I had prepared myself for intimidation. I had dressed carefully and spoken to Isla carefully and held her hand in the car and told myself I was ready for whatever the court was going to feel like.It felt like a home.Not a small one. Not an ordinary one. The building was old and enormous, set back from a private road behind gates that opened without ceremony when our car approached. But inside the entrance hall there were flowers on a table by the door, fresh and simply arranged, and the wolves who met us were dressed plainly and spoke quietly and directed their first words not to me or to Kael but to Isla."You must be Isla," the woman at the door said. She was older, silver haired, with the kind of face that had laugh lines ea
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