Arvella read through the night.
The Matron's chamber was quiet — the deep, layered quiet of a room grown inside a living tree, where the walls breathed and the floor hummed and the canopy ceiling filtered the moonlight into soft, diffused silver that pooled on the polished root floor like spilled mercury. The ley lines beneath the chamber had settled into a steady, warm glow — not the explosive luminescence of Arvella's arrival, but the sustained radiance of a system running at full power for the first time in over a century, the magical equivalent of a furnace that had been banked for years and was now burning clean and bright.
Rowena had given her the chamber. Had placed the seven journals on the root-table and lit the beeswax candles that stood in alcoves of living bark and said, "Rea
