Her name was Vass, and she was ninety-one years old.
Hale brought them to her on a grey Tuesday morning, the address a small house at the territory's furthest edge, where the land sloped downward toward a ridge Tavri had only seen from a distance. The house was older than anything else in Drennick, built in a style that didn't match the territory's other structures — something about the stone, the angle of the windows, speaking of an era nobody currently alive remembered directly.
Vass was sitting in the room's single good chair when they arrived, a woman so old her face had gone past the kind of age you counted and into the kind you simply witnessed. She looked at Tavri and Iris with the specific, unhurried assessment of someone who had been expecting this visit for a very long time and
