Chapter 8: Sable Arrives Like a Change in Pressure

The birds left first.

Maren noticed because she had been noticing birds since she arrived — a cataloguing habit, automatic and unasked-for, the way certain people cannot enter a room without counting exits. Ashveil had a particular avian vocabulary: the grey-backed herring gulls that colonised the harbour wall, the jackdaws that convened each morning on Aldric's chimney stack with the self-important air of a committee that had been meeting longer than the chimney. She had begun to recognise individuals. The jackdaw with the bent primary feather on its left wing. The gull that had learned to open the bins outside the fishmonger's.

On Friday morning, sixteen days after her arrival, they were gone.