Chapter 338 --338
The question landed and stayed there.
Mahir looked at her — really looked at her, the way he rarely looked at anyone, with the full attention he usually kept distributed across a room so that no single person felt its weight. His smile didn’t disappear. It changed quality. It became something more considered, less reflexive, the smile of a man who had just been asked a question he had been expecting and had spent two weeks preparing an answer for and was now deciding, in real time, whether to give the prepared answer or the true one.
"How do we feel," he repeated. Not a question. Turning it over.
Ken had set down the pan. He hadn’t made a production of it — hadn’t turned around dramatically or crossed his arms or done any of the things that people do when they want to signal that a conversation has become serious. He had simply set the pan down and turned, and now he was leaning against the small counter with his arms loose at his sides, watching.
"Honest answer?" Mahir said.
"I have fifteen days of paperwork in my bloodstream," Elara said. "I have no patience for the other kind."
Mahir considered this. Then he said, "Rested. Genuinely rested, which I haven’t been in longer than I can accurately calculate. Fed. Comfortable." He gestured at the room with the easy openness of someone acknowledging an absurdity without apologizing for it. "Somewhat embarrassed by the accommodations, if I’m being truthful — not that we arranged them, but that the people who did apparently had a very specific idea of what imprisoning a beast knight should look like."
"The rugs were here when we arrived," Ken said, from the counter. "We want that on record."
"The spice rack was a later addition," Mahir admitted. "Ken has opinions about cooking."
"Strong opinions," Ken said, without inflection.
Elara looked at them both. "And underneath the rested and the comfortable and Ken’s opinions about spices?"
The smile on Mahir’s face went through another small change — something settling in it, something becoming more accurate. "Uncertain," he said. "Which is not a state I’m accustomed to, and which I find I don’t enjoy particularly. We don’t know what you’re going to do with us. We’ve had two weeks to think about the options and we’ve identified several, and none of them are entirely comfortable to contemplate."