Three months into Hollowmere's slow unwinding, Senna asked Tavri a question that none of the Ledger's careful training had quite prepared her for.
"What was I supposed to be?" she asked. "If the deaths weren't about the bloodline at all — if I never needed to hide this — what would I have grown into, if I'd been allowed to find out at fourteen instead of waiting until I'm forty?"
They were in Senna's kitchen, the third such conversation in as many weeks, the slow patient rhythm that had become, since the territory gathering, the shape of this particular work. Senna had agreed to the gentle remote assessment Kira could provide, but had asked, each time, to delay it by another week — not from fear exactly, Tavri had come to understand, but from something more complicated. A kind of grief f
