Sairis's POV
The library smelled the same.
That was the first thing Sairis had noticed when he walked in. Everything else in the mansion was different.
The walls were stripped back in some rooms, the floors pulled up in others, workers moving through the corridors with tools and timber and the general noise of a building being put back together.
But the library had not been touched yet and it still smelled exactly the way it had when he was a boy. Old paper and wood polish and the faint dustiness of books that had not been opened in a long time.
Sairis had sat down in the chair by the window and picked up a book and told himself he was going to read it, just to pass time while he waited.
He had read the same paragraph six times.
From somewhere above him came the sound of hammering. Then footsteps across bare floorboards. Then a man's voice calling something to another man in the next room.
