The estate yard was quiet at this hour.
Not silent.... Eiswald was never truly silent, not with the wind coming off the northern tree line and the distant sound of the gatehouse watch changing shifts and the creak of old stonework settling into the cold. But quiet. The kind of quiet that only existed in the gap between midnight and the first hour, when the household had finished its last tasks and not yet begun its first ones.
Eleanor stood at the low stone railing at the yard's east edge and looked at the sky.
The moon had set. What remained was stars.... the northern sky in full winter clarity, the kind that only appeared when the cloud cover broke entirely and the cold came down clean and the light from the manor was far enough away to matter. She had learned the northern sky. She had learned every sky she had lived under, in seven years of following him.
She was not thinking about the sky.
She was thinking about what Vivienne had said.
