She'd started going earlier than Petra, which meant going before five.
Not for any good reason — just that the ring at four-thirty was a different space than the ring at five, before even the pre-dawn birds started, before the compound's first wolves were up and moving, before anyone. The dark and the cold and the particular quality of ground that hadn't been disturbed yet.
She worked through the forms slowly. Not for training, not to get better at anything — after three years of Petra's instruction she was as good as she was going to get at the forms, the ceiling visible and familiar. She did them because the repetition required exactly enough attention to keep her mind from going anywhere she didn't want it to go, and not enough to stop her from noticing the morning arrive.
She'd been
