The letter arrived on a Friday.
It came through the borderlands post, which was not a formal system in the way the city's post was a formal system. It was more of an arrangement, a network of people who moved through the outer territories and carried things when asked, the kind of infrastructure that existed in places where the official systems did not reach or were not trusted. Letters sent through it arrived when they arrived, which could mean two weeks or six, and you did not follow up because there was no mechanism for following up.
Aelara had been waiting for this one for four months.
Not anxiously. Just aware of the waiting the way you were aware of a thread you were holding that was long enough to have slack in it. Rhea had been gone seven months. The silence had been exactly what she expected, because Rhea in the borderlands with no crisis requiring communication was Rhea as she was supposed to be, which meant no news was not absence, it was the correct state of things.
