Harrow sat low in the puffed chair between the right-hand couch and the pair of seats opposite. Her long legs sprawled diagonally, one to either side of the footbench, with the left sliding beneath Ondahr’s chair. Her upper body was twisted almost backwards, turned all the way round toward Yu. Both arms rested across the top of the chair’s backrest.
“Hello. Sorry to interrupt,” Yu started, and paused, and started again. “I mean, you got interrupted, during dinner, so I —”
He got no further.
Harrow cut across. “And what an interruption it was! Yessss, finally! Let’s hear it, Yu. Nothing is to see, only blank, through that window, no, rrh, no!”
Yu looked to the thick window by the garderobe. He saw only white. “Well, it’s not the frost. I mean, not only. The glass is just so thick.” It was layered so heavily that it distorted and swallowed everything beyond. “So you sort of need to press your face right up against it.” He knew from cleaning it earlier.
When he turned back, the whole table was staring at him. Everyone but Fallem, who had turned back to the clicking thing in his hand. It was all the awkward silence Yu needed to realise what sort of dumb shit he was babbling.
“So true!” Harrow, seemingly, did not. She pulled in her legs and turned all the way around on her chair, so that she now sat the wrong way around but faced Yu directly, with her folded legs on the seat and her upper body pressed against the backrest. Her arms, as before, were placed on top. Her grin stayed sharp and fixed. “And now, the story, dear watchman Yu!”
No one else looked as inviting as her. Why was she so friendly? Why was she so … normal, when talking to him? Yu had to be normal too. Well, not normal, but himself, whatever counted as normal for him. These people knew his normal. He had to give them that.
“Well, uhm, there was the witch.”
“And?” Harrow leaned towards him, voice too eager, eyes too bright.
The others fixed on him as well.
It took Yu everything he had not to step back. “Tirran said she can’t come in.”
“And???”
“And then she left.”
“And?????”
“Well. All is well. I mean, all is safe.”
“And??????????”
“The. End.”
Harrow barked laughter. “You are, hrrrn, a better storyteller, even, yess, than Imbiad.”
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