The Grand Empress Dowager had known before anyone told her.
That was the thing about being the age she was and having lived the life she had lived — you developed a relationship with loss that younger people did not have, an instinct for it, the specific awareness of the moment when something that had been present in the world stopped being present. Not the details. Not the how or the when or the sequence of events that had produced the outcome. Just the outcome itself, arriving in the body before it arrived in the mind, the way cold arrived before you understood you were cold.
She had been sitting with her tea when it happened.
She had set the cup down.
She had looked at the window for a long time.
•••
Selene came first.
