The village was watching.
Not openly. Not the way a crowd watches—standing in the street, faces forward, attention declared. This was the watching of people who had decided the street was no longer safe but could not make themselves stop looking.
Every shutter in Edenveil had a gap in it.
Raven noticed all of them.
He noticed the elderly man at the farthest window whose white eyebrows were visible above the sill. He noticed the two children who had given up pretending to hide and were simply kneeling on the window bench with their chins propped on the sill, watching with the complete, shameless attention of people who had not yet learned that observation required discretion. He noticed the woman across the square who had cracked her door open three inches and left it there, her eye visible in the gap.
The corner of his mouth moved.
He found it genuinely amusing—this village performing its own absence while failing comprehensively at the performance.
