She found me at the tributary at dusk.
Not because I had gone looking for her — I had gone to the tributary because the board session had run six hours and the compound needed three hours of ordinary quiet before I could be in it fully, and the tributary was where ordinary quiet lived.
She sat beside me without announcement.
Her walking stick. Her walking stick. The compound's evening warmth in the pack bond.
We watched the water for a while.
"The board session," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Cole briefed me," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Aldric filed the report deliberately," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"And now feels the weight of the heir's verdict," she said.
"Yes," I said.
She held her walking stick.
"When I built the monitoring framework," she said, "I built it to find the heir.
