Sitting up is not totally because he nearly kneed her into the ceiling. (It's not completely unrelated.) It is also because it feels like the sort of conversation she suddenly needs her hands for, like he's right but it just isn't so cleanly, simply obvious and of the two of them she is the one who remembers when the clean, simple, obvious answer was the perfect polar opposite of what they now discuss. She lived that, not him, and it is inextricable from just how immense the thing that they had done is,
“Tranquility is meant to be a cure,” she says, reaching for his hands, her eye fixing on his, emphatic. Understand this. “It's not meant to horrify, though it does. Though the way it's used should. It's meant to be peace. It's meant to be better. You have to understand that when I was taught about Tranquility, I wanted it. I didn't think it was fair that you had to be a mage to do it.”
(And you don't, actually, but that's an entirely separate quest-line that Cassandra Pentaghast can't tell anyone about, now,)
“Luwenna Coupe was la limier, the mage hunter. I've heard people sing about how she could ride down an apostate, which technically she is still doing but she'd be in a lot more trouble for it now,” it is mildly surreal that her tone doesn't change for what is absolutely an unnecessary and rude aside about what goes on in that little cottage in the woods, “her qualification for commanding forces was her experience as a decorated Templar. Ten years ago, I had only seen mages enough to count on the fingers of one hand, mostly at a distance, and everyone had told me my entire life that Templars protect us and them. That Tranquility is an unequivocal good for offering a broken thing a use in the Maker's hands. That Circles are the best, safest places for mages to be. That it is heroic to haul someone screaming back into one.”
no subject
“Tranquility is meant to be a cure,” she says, reaching for his hands, her eye fixing on his, emphatic. Understand this. “It's not meant to horrify, though it does. Though the way it's used should. It's meant to be peace. It's meant to be better. You have to understand that when I was taught about Tranquility, I wanted it. I didn't think it was fair that you had to be a mage to do it.”
(And you don't, actually, but that's an entirely separate quest-line that Cassandra Pentaghast can't tell anyone about, now,)
“Luwenna Coupe was la limier, the mage hunter. I've heard people sing about how she could ride down an apostate, which technically she is still doing but she'd be in a lot more trouble for it now,” it is mildly surreal that her tone doesn't change for what is absolutely an unnecessary and rude aside about what goes on in that little cottage in the woods, “her qualification for commanding forces was her experience as a decorated Templar. Ten years ago, I had only seen mages enough to count on the fingers of one hand, mostly at a distance, and everyone had told me my entire life that Templars protect us and them. That Tranquility is an unequivocal good for offering a broken thing a use in the Maker's hands. That Circles are the best, safest places for mages to be. That it is heroic to haul someone screaming back into one.”
A breath—
“You're right. But it's an act of war to say it.”