"You've strung your whole four hundred years on the one thing my blood was born to undo. Watch."
I did not reach for the loom, and I did not reach for Dain, and I did not choose, because choosing was the trap and had always been the trap, the same trap that made a young kind girl into the Warden, and I was done, as of that room, as of that breath, being handed a choice built to make me small.
I dropped to one knee in the middle of a hundred rising wolves, and I put both my hands flat on the cold stone floor of the Circle's seat, and I let the silver come up the way it had come up in Dain's room and on the Ashfall stones and in the birthing dark, all of it, every drop, four hundred years of hunted blood and one day-old daughter's bell still ringing in my bones, and I did not aim it at the
