The chamber felt different when she walked back into it.
Not louder. If anything it was quieter than it had been before the recess, the particular quiet of people who had spent thirty minutes talking and had now stopped, carrying whatever they had decided into their seats and holding it there.
The air had the weight of things unspoken. Aelara had been in enough rooms like this to know that weight was not neutral. It meant the conversations that happened in the corridors had not resolved anything. They had sharpened it.
She took her seat.Vaelor settled in on her left. Maren took the aide's chair against the wall, still slightly flushed from the last ten minutes, her breathing back to normal but her hands doing the thing they did when she was managing adrenaline, stacked flat on her knees. Lyra would be in the gallery. Aelara did not look up.
