The young man from the Astor family was watching Ren with hope and fear in equal measure, the precise combination that came from calculating in real time that if Ren did what he appeared to be considering, the deal the Astor tamer had already accepted was no longer necessary.
Good in one sense: he wouldn't be risking himself. Bad in another: his family wouldn't receive the reduction in their sentence. His face was doing the math openly while he waited to see which side it would land on.
Ren didn't respond.
He just kept looking at the runes intensely.
He was thinking about what he might understand about these structures if he did it, not about opening the door itself but about what the process would show him, what it would teach about how this kind of architecture worked.
Information no book had... The kind that lived in the doing here and nowhere else.
