Harithen’s Homecoming

Concordia, Six Hundred and Ninety Years Before

Thaelen’s office was the one room which had been decorated according to his taste rather than Sigrid’s interpretation of what a fashionable merchant’s home should look like, and thus it was a simpler space, functional, with the only piece of furniture which existed for more decorative purposes being the High Chair of his ancestors which he set behind a desk, facing towards the door.

He heard the arrival of the carriage and was not surprised when Sigrid paused in the doorway within a few minutes, attracted by the flickering lamplights. He took a sip of the whiskey that he was drinking and looked up as she paused by his door. She was wearing a day dress rather than evening wear, the cheerful floral pattern of the fabric Concordian design but cut in the Estrean way – the fabric imported probably by one of his own ships.

That she was dressed in day wear well into the night was a sign that one of her temperamental artists was having dramas. “L