She took it with both hands.
The specific ceremonial gesture of someone who had been trained to receive gifts of value with the appropriate acknowledgment, and who was doing it now with the slightly stunned quality of someone whose body was also receiving the acknowledgment that the giver was within three meters and the passive had been running for an hour.
Her cheeks were faintly warm.
She bowed.
The other two — the nineteen-year-olds, Sora and Wren, their names given by the chieftain at the beginning of the assessment — watched with the specific, calculating attention of young women who had just seen a man with an impossible spatial ring gift an ancient herb to their friend for doing a footwork correction, and were running the mathematics of what this implied about the other things in that ring.
The chieftain watched.
