The compound was quiet in the way it was only before significant things.
Not the crisis quiet — that had a different texture, the specific held-breath quality of five hundred wolves collectively monitoring. This was the other kind. The anticipatory quiet of people who are at the end of the building toward something and feel the arrival of it in the air.
Tomorrow was the wedding.
The herb garden. Spring, exactly as Luna had said. The right people, the right place, the sauce scaled to the correct batch size after four weeks of practice that Darius had conducted with the focused seriousness he brought to everything that mattered.
The compound had been preparing in its specific ways.
Roan had inspected the herb garden three times and had made two subtle adjustments to the gate configurati
