She was gone for six hours.
Nobody knew until she came back.
That was the part that Aelara sat with afterward, the specific quality of not knowing, the six hours in which the day had continued being itself, ordinary and scheduled, while Seraphine had been somewhere doing something that nobody in the Citadel had been told about.
She came back in the late afternoon.
Aelara was in the workroom with Vaelor and Maren when she heard the door below, and then footsteps, and then something in the quality of the house that changed in the way it changed when a specific person entered it, the particular weight of someone arriving.
She was already in the corridor when Seraphine reached the top of the stairs.
Seraphine looked the way she always looked, which was to say composed, unhurried, wearing the specific expression of someone who had done a thing and was ready to account for it. Not guilty. Not afraid of what was coming. Just ready.
She looked, Aelara thought, tired.
