Mary watched them disappear into the settlement with the particular, focused quality of someone whose easygoing expression has already begun its transition into something else — the beautiful brows knitting together with the specific, private quality of a concern that has arrived without announcement and is now being examined with the honest, thorough attention it deserves.
This girl. There is something different about her.
The thought had the particular, precise quality of an observation that has been present since the moment she saw Ambrose and has been waiting for the correct private moment to be acknowledged fully — the specific, changed quality of the niece she remembered against the particular, changed quality of the niece who had just walked through the settlement gates carrying ten thousand kilometers of outer forest travel and something in her bearing that the prestigious academy had not put there and that Mary could not yet name with the specific, exact word it required.
