Sylviana received it standing in the corridor outside her mother's chamber, on no sleep, with her mother's warmth still on her hands, and she read the parchment twice and set it down without shaking.
Nymeria read it once.
She read it, and crushed it in her fist, and turned to the human standing beside her in the corridor with the dawn coming up green behind him, and the fastest elf alive, four hundred years of loyal service, four hundred years of kneeling to exactly one elf, looked at a man she had pinned nothing to and wanted to shoot and had taken a blade for, and asked him, sincerely, for the first time.
"What do you need me to do?"
She came to him at midnight, on the last night of her freedom, and she did not come for politics.
