She didn't knock.
That was something she'd decided somewhere between the corridor junction and his door a small decision that carried more weight than it should have, because the old version of this, the version she'd maintained for years, would have knocked. Would have given him the option of composing himself before she walked in.
She didn't do that anymore. She pushed the door open and said his name and he was already sitting up.
He hadn't been asleep.
She could tell from the way he moved not the slow rearrangement of someone pulled out of sleep but the immediate, focused motion of someone who had been lying in the dark waiting for something to happen. He had his boots on. He hadn't put them on to sleep in. He'd put them on because some part of him had known.
"Seraphine," Aelara said. "She's here. She knows the name."
