“I’m not altering it.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I had rehearsed many answers to many impossible questions.
This one arrived without rehearsal.
“Asking her the question myself.”
Something in Astra’s face changed, quick enough that most of the room would miss it: possibility, before she hid it.
It almost undid me.
Quill’s smile vanished.
“The Convergence is not a courtship,” he said.
“It is a record,” I said.
“And the record allows an offered question to be corrected before answer.” Aldric’s voice came from the faculty line.
The room turned toward him.
He had not moved. Juno stood beside him, one hand resting on the rim of the small basin at her side.
Quill glared at Aldric.
“That precedent is obsolete.”
“It remains a documented precedent,” Aldric said.
Linden’s pen hovered over the page.
For the first time that night, Quill had to look away from me to keep the room.
Juno’s eyes found Astra and she said nothing.
She didn’t need to. Her hand stayed on the basin.
Cosima’s pen moved again.
She was writing on the Council page instead of her own notebook.
I made myself look away from her before she noticed me looking and my gratitude became another cruelty toward her.
My father stepped down from the witness line.
One step.
Caswell moved at the same time and stopped at Quill’s glance.
Kieran Marsh stayed where he was, though it must have pained him more than the room understood. His Mark flared green-gold through the shoulder of his coat. He looked at me as if he would enjoy hating me and had been inconvenienced by the fact that I was making it difficult.
Hale stood on the faculty side, his Mark steady beneath the opened sleeve.
Three men in the room had been called by her Mark.
Only one of us had been placed beside her by the Council.
