It came out sideways, the way the important things sometimes did.
Sera had been in the training ring with Petra — full sessions again, the kind that left her properly tired in the good way — and afterward, walking back through the compound, she'd passed the nursery wing where Rowan's room had been set up months ago, separate from the cradle-beside-the-desk arrangement, a proper room with proper things in it, because Rowan was almost a year old now and the cradle had become, gently, too small.
Through the open door she could see Darius.
He was sitting on the floor — actual floor, cross-legged, with the specific careful posture of a large man trying to make himself smaller for a small person's benefit — and Rowan was standing, holding onto his knee, the new and extremely serious business
