Ysabet’s half-step backward hurt Pip worse than the hammer blow on the frame.
Inside the closed crown, the assembled old mind seized on that flinch at once. She is afraid of what you can do, the smooth thought pressed through their shared nerves, because she is still outside it. Take the ache out of her right hand. Fold her into the quiet where she doesn’t have to guess what you mean, and she will never flinch from you again.
Pip stared up at Ysabet with both amber eyes—the larger right one and the smaller left one.
Ysabet’s face was pale, and her heart was hammering fast enough that Pip could hear the blood in her throat without even opening its side-folds. She was afraid of the voice that had just come out of its mouth.
Yet she had not run up the tunnel, and she had not dropped to her knees on the shingle like the soldiers along the black stone rib. She stood three feet from the points of the closed crown with her boots planted in the wet shale, her left hand steady at her side, and her bent right hand held out in plain view where she had put it.
