Chapter 5: What Seraphine Writes After Midnight

The rain arrived at the second hour, as promised, and it was the methodical sort — not dramatic, not apologetic, simply committed to the task of being rain in the way that certain people are committed to being difficult. It found every gap in the waystation roof and made use of them. The fire hissed in three separate places and gave up, briefly, before deciding to continue on reduced terms.

I had not slept.

This was not insomnia in any distressing sense. I have always been a light sleeper — my father attributed this to an overactive cataloguing instinct, which he meant as a criticism and which I have come to accept as a reasonable description. The mind, when left unsupervised in the dark, tends to arrange things. Mine had been arranging things for two hours, and the arrangement it kept returning to was a square of partially burned paper folded into my inner pocket, and the exact angle of Aldric Sorne's smile, and the distance between those two facts, which might be considerable or might be nothing at all.