Tavin came to the base before the light had finished arriving.
He came alone, on foot, walking slow and even, the way a man walks when he has already decided what to say and is done rehearsing it.
Sera arrived twenty minutes after, on a borrowed horse, restless, since she had decided nothing yet and meant to do all of it inside the room.
Alistair watched both of them from the window, and he was quietly amused.
'They have not been told a single thing yet,' he thought, 'and somehow they already know it is something they will hate.'
Elara set a kettle on the iron stove in the corner. Due sat at the table with three documents spread in front of him, and a fourth one face-down beneath his left hand. That last one was meant for Tavin, not Sera.
Silas was somewhere in the base, the way he always was when a meeting did not need him, and none of them could say where.
