Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

Lys Vane did not come down to the fourth ring. She was far too clever for that; she knew the crew was the one place Wren was armored, knew that Doss would have looked at a House woman in clean clothes and handed her a bucket or thrown her out, and either way the spell would have broken. So she didn't invade the room. She did the worse thing. She waited until Wren stepped out of it, and then she gave my daughter the one thing I never had.

She talked to her like she was already grown.

I didn't see it happen. I heard about it the way I heard about everything now, secondhand and too late — Wren came home from a settling she hadn't told me she'd agreed to, a boundary dispute up on the third ring that Lys had, of course, arranged, and my daughter was quiet in a way she hadn't been quiet before, a thinking quiet, a rearranged quiet, and I knew before she said a word that someone had gotten to her.