"Call it a keen sense of observation," she replies automatically, and then seems to think better of it for she pauses, does what Richard had not - which is to say, she glances down the stairwell and also to the corridor she had hooked and reeled him in from -, and then adds with a certain air of sotto voce delicacy: "I'm rather good at seeing things. Which is to say actually seeing. Of course Kirkwall and the activity of the Gallows is so suffused with magic that it is all but impossible to say where one strange bit of enchantment ends and the other begins, and at first I hardly recognized the difference. But over the course of our conversation in the Hightown house, it slowly became apparent to me that something was different. It is something like drinking wine, you see. At first it all just tastes like wine and one cannot begin to easily describe the varietals."

Their elbows are still linked together.