Ray-Ray had been wearing gloves indoors for three days.
That was the first thing. Rachel Creighton, who considered gloves an insult to her healing hands and had once lectured an entire dinner table on the sensory importance of bare fingertips, had worn pale grey kid gloves to breakfast on Monday. On Tuesday she'd worn them to the library. On Wednesday she'd worn them to the training hall, where she'd healed a sprained wrist through the leather rather than take them off, and the boy with the wrist had stared at her the whole time as if she'd grown a second head.
The second thing was that she'd been happy.
Not ordinary happy. Rachel was ordinary-happy fairly often; it was very annoying. This was something else. She'd been serene. She'd sat across from me at breakfast with her gloved hands folded around her teacup and listened to me needle her about her hair, and she had smiled at me, warmly, and not risen to it once.
