She stood at the door of the east wing and she felt eight years old again.
Not frightening. Just the specific feeling of the past and the present landing in the same space at once, which was too much and not enough at the same time, the way those moments always were.
The door was real. The grey stone was real. The east window, catching the late afternoon light at the exact angle she had kept in her memory for twenty-five years, was exactly as she remembered it, which meant her memory had been accurate and that was its own kind of thing to absorb.
She stopped at the threshold.
She did not go in immediately.
Behind her the group arranged itself the way it had learned to arrange itself, which was around the situation rather than in the middle of it. Vaelor stopped at her shoulder.
