Chapter 9: What Cael and Sable Are to Each Other

The confrontation happened on a Sunday, which seemed to Maren an inappropriate day for it, though she could not have said why. Perhaps because Sunday in Ashveil had a particular quality of held breath — the shops closed, the harbour quiet, the fog lying low and even over the water like something that had given up trying to move. It was the sort of day that felt parenthetical, suspended between the weeks on either side of it, and parenthetical days should not, she felt, contain the things this one contained.

She had gone to the forest edge alone.

This was not wisdom. She knew it was not wisdom. But Aldric had been in his study since before she woke, which meant the door was closed and the silence behind it was the particular kind that did not welcome interruption, and Petra had a Sunday family obligation that involved her maternal grandmother and a long lunch and absolutely no mobile reception, and Maren had spent Saturday night lying awake thinking about the word soon and the smell from the Gull Lane cottage and the way Cael's face had done something at the corridor window that she had not quite catalogued correctly in the moment and needed to look at again, from a distance, the way you look at a word you've written and suddenly cannot tell if you've spelled it right.