"You're not eating," she pointed out. Halving the french toast she pushed some towards him, before taking a bite herself.
"Okay. Right. But..." But what? She knew she had a point or a question, it just escaped her for the moment. Oh,that was it! "But, sooner or late people will get fed up with they way he runs things, or think they can do better and either challenge him, because we have short memories, history shows that. Or, they try to leave."
"Plus whatever he knows can be learned. You'd just have to know where to look. Someone would try possibly succeed and then he'd have trouble on his hands. So he'd have to both defeat the usurper and strike fear into people to keep them from switching sides."
If she kept talking she wasn't sleepy. Not being sleepy meant no chance of drifting off. Not falling asleep, in turn, meant no bad dreams. There was a flaw in that logic, she knew, somewhere, but she was flummoxed as to where.