Chapter 26: Siovhan Speaks at Last

The fire had been burning low for some time before Siovhan moved.

She had been standing, for the duration of my recitation and all of Edric's subsequent speaking, at the outermost rim of the firelight — not outside it, precisely, but at its very edge, in the manner of someone who has decided to remain available for consultation without committing to full participation. I had been aware of her there throughout. Her stillness during a long evening was unremarkable; I had catalogued it as one of her three or four varieties of silence, the particular one that indicated she was conducting an internal reckoning of some considerable weight. The arrow she had nocked and never drawn was still in her left hand, held loosely, the fletching resting against her fingers with the absent-minded ease of a woman who had been holding arrows for several centuries and no longer needed to think about it.

She came forward now.