Every word he gave her, she took and carefully held in her mind, turning them gently around, taking every part of them, and studying them for what they were and what they could mean. Beauty recalled how bitterly she hated the City for taking her from her family and putting her in so foreign a place as this. Was it the same for him? I don't know what you mean by 'better', he said, and she smiled sadly. Could it be that he didn't see it? When all you saw was gray for so, so long, what must the City be to eyes like that? Why... they must look like Errol's eyes - vaguely wondrous, disbelieving. But Monsieur Preston remained cold, except for brief slivers of confusion... and pain.
The tea tray went on the coffee table between them. She poured him a cup and only hesitated briefly over the honey and milk. Errol drank his coffee black. It wasn't a reasonable expectation that Monsieur Preston would be the same, but it wasn't, in her mind, unreasonable, either. She handed her guest the unsweetened cup of tea and set out a plate of ginger cookies to compliment the tea.
For her own, it received honey and lemon. When she settled back on the couch, her eyes slid back to the jacket. "He was your partner," she said. "In Libria. You and he were..." She paused. Had he quit before Errol? Had it been Monsieur Preston who broke them from the life of a Cleric? Beauty realized that she'd never heard exactly the way that Errol quit the life of a Cleric.
"But you said ex-partner, before. What happened?" She asked it gently, in a way that invited the deadly man across from her to tell her everything... oh, everything.