Chapter 28: Veyra Mourne's Sincere Offer

The fifth day began with frost on the inside of the archive windows.

Mara had slept four hours and knew it precisely because she had noted the time when the candle guttered and the time when she woke, both recorded in the margin of the weather log she kept separate from the official proceedings. The grey residue had thickened overnight on the eastern sills. She scraped a small sample onto a piece of clean parchment, folded it, and labeled it with the date and the wind direction and the observation that it tasted faintly of iron when she touched her finger to her tongue, which she immediately noted as an imprecise methodology.

She was going to tell Aldric about it in the morning session.