Location:Seven Peaks — The Hall; The East Barracks
Date/Time:TC1857.12.28 – TC1858.01.01
Kairos made the tea too strong on the twenty-eighth, and Raven drank it anyway, standing at the Hall window at the second hour, and it tasted of the pot and of the leaf left in too long and faintly of iron, the way everything tasted of iron at Seven Peaks in the last week of the year when the water came up from the deep cistern because the high one had frozen.
She liked it. She had never told him that. He had never asked, and made it too strong every morning, and she had begun to suspect that he knew exactly how strong it was.
The letter from Windbreak was on the table behind her. She had read it twice and was waiting for the tea to finish before she read it a third time, because she already knew what it said, and the third reading was for finding out what she thought about it.
***
