“Oh?” Stephen asks, an eyebrow arched, nonplussed. He’s a connoisseur of doing stupid reckless shit. Tends to leap before he looks and dive into magic without reading all the instructions beforehand, and while he feels that immediate nervous leap in his chest at her statement and wondering what it means,

he’s a smart man, he can perhaps guess, but that would also be presumptuous. When, objectively and realistically speaking, there are so many other stupid things Gwenaëlle could do. She’s carrying tidings of secret elven spy meetups. Maybe it’s something about a political alliance, or planning on assassinating someone, or helping someone else assassinate someone, or otherwise simply pulling those threads of the Great Game which she hates so much, or some other extremely work-relevant mystery she’s unravelled in Halamshiral —