[ She sees how he freezes for a moment, ironically like a startled deer in the second before it bolts away. He doesn’t run, though, and her smile widens. She knows she could have easily put a rift between them just now, but she’s pleased that he decides to accept her comment for what it really is: a way to extend her hand toward him in friendship.

Her chin rests delicately on her hand when he asks his question in turn, humming as she thinks back. ]

When I was with the Mittelfrank, we actually produced an opera based on an Almyran legend. Almyra was more of a point of curiosity in the Empire, rather than the mortal enemy of the Alliance. We had Brigid and Dagda to worry about, after all—Almyra was hardly our concern.

So we put on a show about a woman whose eyes could see for miles into the distance, so keen that her vision served as a premonition for the people of her village. Their enemies could never take them by surprise, until they thought to disguise themselves as rocks and trees. When the woman told her village what she’d seen, they thought she was going mad, imagining moving trees. Everyone dies in the end, unsurprisingly. It was a perfect story for an opera.

Of course, we changed the names and added a love story to make it that much more tragic. By the time we opened, it wouldn’t have been easy to recognize as a foreign story. But I remember the books we used to write the story and the score—gilded volumes from Almyra, full of beautiful illustrations.

[ She gestures to the right side of her face where Claude’s braid used to hang. ]

It was pretty brazen of you to wear your hair like that, you know.