CORVA POV
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Corva held the letter for a long time after Neva went to find Ryke.
She did not go inside. She sat on the bench with the paper in her lap and looked at Ashveil in the mid-morning light and let herself feel, for the first time in longer than she could accurately measure, the full weight of sixty years arriving at a door that had finally, actually opened.
She had told the story before. Many times, in fragments, to people who received it as one woman's account and filed it accordingly — sympathetically, sometimes, but never as fact. Facts required corroboration. She had none. She had only memory, and memory, however precise, however carried carefully across decades without a single detail permitted to soften or drift, was not evidence.
Now it was.
Now there was Grath's nam
