Maren's room was at the end of the east corridor, and it smelled like old paper and dried herbs and the particular mineral quiet of stone that had absorbed decades of someone thinking very hard inside it.
The door was open.
She was seated in a high-backed chair facing the window, her walking stick across her knees, a cup of tea on the side table that had gone cold enough to stop steaming. She didn't turn when we entered, but her shoulders acknowledged us — the slight adjustment of someone who has been waiting and is choosing how to be found.
Darius stopped in the doorway.
I stepped past him.
"Sit down, girl," Maren said.
"I prefer to stand," I said. "We've been through this."
"And yet you always sit." She finally turned, and the face she showed us was not the one I was used to — not
