Aria’s POV)

The kitchens were a cave of warmth at that hour, a place of steady, honest labor where night swallowed the rest of the keep and only the hearth remained witness. We’d finished the last of the evening pots; the clatter of serving had faded hours ago. I liked the quiet the way heat thinned the edges of grief and left only work. It made thinking manageable—if thinking ever was.

Tonight, only three of us remained: my mother with a basket of herbs, a tired apprentice named Mara ...