She submitted the request in writing, which was how I knew she had been thinking about it for a long time.
Seraphina did not commit things to paper unless she had decided on them completely. The act of writing was, for her, a form of finality. She had told me this once, in the east sitting room, in one of the conversations that had been neither strategic nor transactional and had therefore carried more weight than most.
The letter was on my desk on a Thursday morning, beside the correspondence from the duchy's northern administrative office and a brief note from Isolda's merchant network that I had not yet opened. I read Seraphina's letter first.
