“Gwenaëlle,” she insists at once, where someone else might have been corrected with Captain but Maker forbid Kieran think she means him to actually call her that. After Kieran there had been her cousins at the banisters, or learning card-counting from pirates, or spending altogether too much time with their grandfather’s sultry-eyed Nevarran mage — they, too, all but grown.

She’d thought, once, that they’d have won the war by the time she saw Kieran again. She’s learned, since, to appreciate seeing someone she loves at all.

It is impossible not to think of Alistair, and difficult for a moment to talk around her heart in her throat, but she’s beaming like he’s the best thing she’s seen all day when she does say, “I’m taller in my memory, too. When did you get here? No, —walk with me, I’m going to my office, I just need to put a few things down. Hardie, you remember Kieran,”

if she’s smaller than he remembers, the Anderfels shepherd that haunts her heels is probably bigger, nosing forward from well-behaved sentinel to overly-familiar curious animal at her encouragement.