Katarina had lived in Vellasera for seventeen years and she did not know where the tea house was.
That realization came at roughly ten in the morning, standing at the harbor market with no agenda for the first time she could remember, watching a woman haggle over the price of squid with an intensity that would have been appropriate for a hostage negotiation.
She hadn't come here for any reason. No meetings, no vendor assessments, no quarterly check-ins. She'd woken up, looked at her planning notes for Coppara, and thought: I'm about to negotiate a port town into compliance and I've never spent an unstructured afternoon in my own port town.
So she'd put the notes down and walked out the front door.
