Chapter 16: Aeron Chooses to Intervene, Without Announcement

The first thing he did was finish his coffee.

Not quickly, not with ceremony — he simply lifted the cup, drank the last of it with the unhurried attention he had been giving coffee for three weeks now, learning its particular language of bitterness and heat, and set it down on the saucer with a small, final sound. Then he pushed back his chair and stood, and the quality of his standing was different from all the other times he had stood in that café, though Margaret, moving between tables with a cloth, would not have been able to say precisely how. She noticed it the way you notice a change in barometric pressure: somewhere below thought, in the part of the body that still remembers weather.

Seris looked up from her notebook.