I watched them more carefully after that night. Not anxiously, I had decided very early that anxiety was not a useful response to extraordinary children and that whatever they were becoming required clear-eyed attention rather than fear.
So, I watched carefully, and I noted what I saw, and I tried to understand it with the same methodical approach I brought to everything the gift produced.
What I saw was extraordinary and alarming in approximately equal measure.
The silver-eyed one I had been calling her Seren privately, in the part of my mind that was already attaching to her with the specific attachment of someone who has held a person and understood immediately that the holding is permanent, absorbed moonlight passively.
Not just at night, not just under the direct moon. The residu
