bale of duck through the door she had been taught to curtsey in front of. Two clerks sat in the courtyard at a trestle, arguing over a ledger, and one of them was eating a pear.
Reyna stood across the lane in the shadow of a wine-seller's awning and did not move for a long time.
She had told herself, on the crossing, that this would be the easy part. The hard part would come later — the Warden, the court, the question of her name. The house she had expected to hurt in a clean and manageable way, the way a scar hurts when the weather turns. What she had not expected was to feel nothing at all for a full minute, and then, without warning, to feel an anger so precise and so cold that it surprised her into gripping the edge of the awning's post for balance. They had not even pulled the gull down. They had only erased it enough to make it cheaper.
A boy of perhaps twelve came out of the house carrying a stack of tally-sticks under each arm. He paused in the doorway to shift his grip, and his eye passed over her and over the wine-seller and over the cat on the wine-seller's barrel, and went back inside, and the door closed behind him, and Reyna saw that the old iron bell-pull her father had installed the year she was born had been replaced with a length of cord.
She turned away. It was unwise to stand so long in one place, and she knew it, and she had stood there anyway. The lesson she had learned in exile, and the lesson she had set herself to unlearn, was that grief was a discipline and could be postponed. She walked on, down the lane and across the little bridge where the beggars sat and up the steps to the tavern quarter, and she did not look back at the house until she reached the corner, and then she looked back once, only once, and she marked the three windows on
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.