It's both force of habit and his preferred behavior: he stands when she does, at attention with his hands folded behind his back, though that look of confusion is still at the forefront. "I understand plenty. With all due respect to your abilities, ma'am, if I did want you dead, you would be." It would sound like a threat to anyone else, but somehow he knows she'll take it for the statement of fact that it is. "And quite frankly, you're not me."

He watches her with his head tipped to one side as she turns her back on him and looks back, and then glances down at the couch to see the small rips he's accidentally put there. Fix the couch? Out here? It's irritating, he thinks suddenly, she's irritating in a way none of his siblings have ever quite managed, but that's only one tiny thread out of the tangle.

Still, though. Irritating. "Fine," he says shortly, looking back at her again. "I'm not going to kill you. I'm afraid you'll need to look elsewhere for that kind of absolution." And now that she's leaving the room, he returns to the windowsill in a blur of motion almost too fast to see, and sits again more slowly, already turning away to look out at the stars and the lines of shadow in the woods.