Lysa had found a moment of quiet, at the palace gardens at twilight, away from council chambers and watchful eyes.
The air carried the sweet scent of night jasmine and the faint, earthy aroma of damp soil after a brief afternoon shower.
She sat on a stone bench near the central fountain, her new attendant's uniform still feeling slightly too formal against her skin. The promotion to Seren's personal attendant had lifted her from the servant quarters to a comfortable room in the noble wing, but it had also brought a strange kind of loneliness. The other attendants treated her with a mix of deference and resentment. The servants she had once worked beside now looked at her with a mixture of awe and suspicion. She was no longer one of them, but she wasn't quite one of the nobilities either.
