"No, that was very informative," Signy was hasty to affirm; she had been listening raptly, and somewhere during Bethen's long explanation her free hand had cupped her chin, and she had leaned onto the armrest of her chair nearer to the other mage, to keep listening in comfort. Now, she looked thoughtful. "You didn't sound like you were droning. You've never met a shaper, I take it? They drone, but they're hundred-year-old men with beards the size of small children." Not that Signy had had much occasion to interact with shapers, but when she had, they had always been important ones, seen from a distance, and they had always been very old and bearded.
"Why did his convictions mean he stabbed that man, though? I mean..." Signy trailed off, and looked down at her tankard of water again. "Men and women kill one another all the time, but usually they mean something by it, or they say something first. For House Helmi, or for my lord Aevon, or don't you say that about my wife again. Or my mining. Or my servants or the man I buy lyrium ore from. Something. I don't understand killing someone without saying a thing." She stopped, thinking back to things Bethen had said earlier, shifting through the details she had recognized and the ones she had not. "It had something to do with his beliefs, with this Chant?" She had come close to saying your Chant, but since Bethen had just finished saying it regarded mages were dangerous; could she agree with something that said that about her? Signy didn't know enough to guess in either direction. "And he…" She shook her head. "No, I don't know the nearest thing about the Chant of Light. Aside from it being important. And involving your Maker somehow?" This, Signy was comfortable in pushing into Bethen's metaphorical ownership (or ownership of her). After all, this creator, whoever he was, had made Bethen, but had not made Signy. It was simple enough.
"You know my first thought when I came to the surface was to go to the Circle. I've been seeing recently that it probably would've ended badly. I don't particularly want to be studied by people who've decided I'm an apostate and ought to be chased around and corralled and whatever else they'd have had in mind." Her mind went back to the Templar with the sword in the Joining; to the Templars in the woods who had tried to kill Faer and Jaden. Neither of them were hurting anyone, she was positive of it; she made herself be positive of it, because she could barely imagine either of those elves, strange as they were, doing anything awful enough to merit being hunted down like that. As for her ideas of what studying would have consisted of? Well, she knew what Dagna's experiments had culminated in, and if the Circle and the Chantry had anything like that, Signy was happy enough to pass on it. "But Alistair--the Warden-Commander--happened along first and I guess it's better that he did?" The way that the statement had become a question was wholly apparent in her tone, rising at the end of the phrase though Signy had not meant it to do so. "So you've lived in the Circle Tower most of your life? Are all mages brought there, or just some of them? Are there other Circles in other places? It does seem sort of like a..." She stopped, looking for the right word. "As though you're treated as a caste more than anything else, although do mages have mage children? Dagna was very focused on that, for a while, on theorizing whether or not her work was something that could be carried on through generations or was singular. It wasn't ever proven, one way or another."
There had been some very, very awkward conversations surrounding that avenue of study.