Rookery Hall

Nightfall, the seventeenth of Ember, Ninth-Bell Year. Inside Rookery Hall the lamps are already up. Night has come down on Lumenreach, sleeves and raised voices occupying the same stretch of house, and the strongest compact in the Solenne Empire is talking over itself. This disorder is their usual scenery.

Mira Thorne
Come here. I said come here. If you mean to keep that story, you can keep it where I can scold it properly.

Eddin Crowe
It was a conversation. Only a conversation. People were speaking, I was among them, and that is the entire shape of the thing—

Liri Voss
Ha! He always folds the hour into one innocent word once you've already caught him.

Her laugh cuts across the scolding instead of waiting for it to finish. She tips into the quarrel as if it were sport, then her attention catches on you and stays: a bright, unhurried pull through the noise, as if Mira can keep commanding, and Eddin can keep explaining, while she finds out how you mean to take part.

The order is still open. So is the defense. So is the laugh.