Sophie did not try to make him stay.
She had understood something over the year of his absence that some people took considerably longer to understand, the specific knowledge that the people who mattered most were sometimes the people whose leaving was the cost of their becoming what they needed to become. She had arrived at this understanding through some combination of her own nature and whatever Alvis had been building in her across the months of early morning training and the afternoons she had spent with Fedora in gardens and palace corridors absorbing things that were not formally taught.
She stood at the estate gate with Mittens beside her in the first light of the departure morning, and her expression contained everything without presenting any of it as demand.
He stopped in front of her.
She held out her hand.
