Chapter 23 — The Weight of Years

This should surprise no one by now. The house had opinions about everything — the temperature of the kettle, the angle of the curtains, the precise firmness of Aldren's pillows, which it adjusted through some mechanism that involved neither springs nor sorcery nor anything that could be named in daylight. The leather-bound shutters swayed at a frequency that suggested approval when Kayline carried Aldren from the upright position he'd insisted on maintaining to the horizontal position his body required. He protested twice, both times with words that slurred into each other like drunks leaving a tavern, and then stopped protesting because consciousness itself had become negotiable.

Mireth sat on the floor beside the bed with Harrow's head in her lap. The wolf slept the way wolves sleep — one ear cocked, one eye technically open, every muscle pretending to be relaxed while remaining capable of launching teeth-first at anything stupid enough to test the threshold. His fur was clean. Sometime between the healing and the return to the house, Corvus had brought moss from the spring and dropped it on Harrow's flank, which was either an act of care or an insult depending on how one interpreted corvid social dynamics. Vesper blinked twice from the rafters and said nothing, which for Vesper was practically a monologue.