By the time Rowan turned three, the gift had settled into something that looked, from the outside, almost ordinary.
This was Maren's word for it — *ordinary* — used with the specific satisfaction of someone whose life's work had produced exactly what she'd hoped for. The truth-reading was still there, still functioning, still capable of the things it had always been capable of. But it no longer announced itself the way it had at five months, at the ridge, in the council chambers. It had become, instead, part of how Rowan simply was — a three-year-old who noticed things other three-year-olds didn't, who sometimes said things that landed with unexpected weight, and who otherwise spent their days doing what three-year-olds did: asking "why" approximately four hundred times a day, refusing fo
