The morning came in gray.
Not the failed-instrument gray of Castellan's arrival — the ordinary gray, the kind the academy's eastern weather brought in three or four mornings a week, fog at the lower terraces, cloud sea moving at its standard rhythm, the leyline grid registering everything correctly. The world had returned to its usual scale of disorder. I appreciated the quietness of ordinary days. The team had not had one in a while.
I stood at the western balcony with my notebook open.
Nineteen names. The seventeen Krethven children. Sera's drawing as the eighteenth. Tev Castellan as the nineteenth — Iren's grandmother's brother, six years old, two hundred and forty years ago, now released from the Office's private register to the public one.
I had been looking at the page for ten minutes.
