A servant slipped into the room on quiet feet, setting out the tea service and filling two cups with a dimly sweet smelling herb tea. "Kerwon tea," Domina explained briefly. "Made from jasmine, darling. Shipped in with the recent silks from the far east." Small talk, really, though the situation hardly required it. Domina was a noblewoman through and through; the art of conversation, the intricacies of time-filling speech, proprieties, were ingrained right down to her marrow.
The servant left; Domina sat. "To the business at hand," she said, gesturing to the books. "I've pulled out everything we have on—" How to put this delicately? "—prophetic dreams. And history of sudden fires in the city. Surely there is something here to point you in the right direction, yes?" She set her tea to the side and was all at once someone quite different than Domina Van Eldt, noblewoman and rumor-mill queen. She was a woman who had chosen an unexpected mage's path; she had clawed and scrabbled her way into an unassailable position within her home and society; she was not to be pushed around by something as ludicrous as ominous dreams. "What do you remember?"