Maera's rooms were on the second terrace, behind a door that had been painted nine times and never once stripped.
She was somewhere past sixty, small, with a scholar's stoop and the eyes of a bird that has learned where the bins are. There was no ceremony about her at all. She looked at Rhys, and then she looked at Eira for slightly too long, and then she said, "Well. Shut the door, then," and went to put water on.