Duke came with us, which he hadn't announced, just appeared in the car park with his jacket and his sketchbook in the specific way he appeared places — without ceremony, simply there.
The packlands looked the same.
Of course they did. A few weeks was nothing to a landscape. The same grey sky, the same forest at the edge of the territory, the same packed-earth road leading into the residential cluster. I'd grown up here in the peripheral way of someone who'd never quite felt anchored to it, useful and unremarkable and present in the way that asked nothing and claimed nothing.
I was a different weight on this road now.
Garrick Vane met us at the edge of his property line.
He looked diminished — not dramatically, just the specific diminishment of a man who'd been carrying an enormous sec
