The council hall was not finished.
This was, in retrospect, entirely appropriate. The supernatural world's first formal four-species governing body was being convened in a building that still had no eastern wall, three of its six windows were temporary canvas, the floor was packed earth rather than the stone that the fae had offered to grow from the bedrock once they understood what floors were for and why wolves wanted them flat, and the central table — a magnificent piece of work that Timber Ridge's craftsmen had produced in four days from a single fallen cedar — smelled powerfully of fresh timber and the particular determination of people who had decided that good enough for now was better than perfect too late.
The building was not finished.
The alliance was not finished either. The
