The name surfaced from somewhere beneath everything else the afternoon had deposited in his awareness — beneath the lightning serpents and the sealed chamber and Nina's ice arrows and the antelope and the empty, corpse-scattered forest — and arrived with the specific, slightly disorienting quality of a memory that belongs to a version of himself that feels further away than the time elapsed would justify.....
Zerin.
She looked exactly as he remembered, which was to say she looked like someone who occupied whatever space she was in with the complete, unhurried confidence of a person who has never seriously entertained the possibility that the space might not want her there. The starlight quality in her eyes was the same — that particular, luminous quality that sat just far enough outside the ordinary range of human appearance to register as something other than a cosmetic detail. It was the kind of look that saw things and did not always bother to announce what it was seeing.
