Three months of training with my mother ended on a Tuesday, with frost on the balcony rail and nothing to mark it but a second cup of tea. I had taken an old art apart and rebuilt it in a new language. The work was done. The promise was ready to be kept. But before the mountain, there was the city.
Cecilia, with her usual terrifying efficiency, had ordered what she called "a period of systemic decompression." In plain words, she told me to take a day off before I forgot how. I knew exactly how I wanted to spend it.
Finding Seraphina was easy. She was in the penthouse's small, climate-controlled conservatory, which she had slowly turned into a corner of the far north. Frost-ferns grew there in neat geometric fans, and the air smelled cool and clean, like the first breath outside on a winter morning. She sat on a plain stone bench reading a paper book, her silver hair bright against the dark green of the ferns.
"I am under strict orders to decompress," I said from the doorway.
