Aldis arrived with no announcement and very little luggage.
She was not what I'd built in my head — which I recognized as a failure of imagination on my part, because I had been building her from the letter-writer's voice and the image of someone small and careful, someone who had stayed quiet and then spent years wishing she hadn't. What walked through the gate was a woman my height, broad-shouldered, with the weathered ease of someone who had spent a lot of time outdoors and had stopped being bothered by what that meant for her appearance. She had the kind of face that didn't perform itself — not plain, not striking, just honest. Every expression landed where it was supposed to and stayed there.
She looked at Shadowmere through the gate and took a breath.
The breath of someone arrivin
