The frost came in the night.
Vane saw it from the kitchen window before he saw anything else — the hill paths white at the edges, the garden wall carrying a thin layer that caught the early light, the bird sitting on its stone with frost on its shoulders and the patient expression of something that had nowhere else to be regardless of temperature.
The repair stone in the lower Academic District held the cold differently from the old. The new sections stayed white longer. The frost had found the seam between them and made it visible, a line across the lower district that would be gone by the ninth hour but was there now, clean in the early light.
Mara was already at the counter.
She had the accounts ledger open and the blend made and his bowl on the table before he sat down. She did not look up. She was tracking something in the figures that required three quick pen corrections.
"The ceremony," she said.
"Yes."
