Everyone in this room is quick to wake, much the way you might drop a cup and accidentally send all of Barrow’s cats running, careening and bouncing off the walls. But this is— something else, worse than the usual. She’s seen Talin bolt awake in the morning before, but not so quick as this; not crossing the room before she’d noticed; not knife out before he was even fully conscious.

Once he collapses back on the bed, she runs her thumb across her neck, and it comes away red. Like a shaving cut. It’s small.

She sits down on her own bed across from his, and starts working on unlacing her boots. Her heart’s still pounding, the rush of finding danger in an unexpected place. That adrenaline swallows what ordinarily could’ve been a laugh at the joke, and it takes her a moment to reply.

“The limp’s not,” she decides, “’cos it means you won’t be able to run, but the bruises can be hot. What was it, a bar fight?”

It can’t have been. She gets into bar fights. Talin— not the type, from the little she knows of him thus far.