They spoke in a colonnade where whispers travel like arrows. Corax carried quietly like a tool. His shadow looked like it knew what it was doing.
"Vengeance remembers itself too loudly," she said. "Restoration doesn't need an audience."
He studied her for what she was—young, yes, and still a person who chose to be soft where others chose to harden. Kindness, in her hands, was a dagger that cut both ways, and she would rather turn the edge toward herself than let an innocent bleed.
"Tell me," Corax said after a time, voice low. "If you take the pain so others don't drown in it… Do you think that is enough?"
"I don't know," she answered, honest as the light between pillars. "But if you are hurting, I will take it from you—even if I must lift it out of you and bear it myself. I won't watch you be swallowed by pain, or hatred, or thirst for revenge."
He did not reply. Silence suited him, and it held.
"Some victories deserve to be forgotten," he said at last, almost to himself. Later, when he took apart a network of cruelty without a speech or a banner, he remembered her words—and remembered to set the blade down when the reckoning was done, especially when the wounds were his sisters'. He thought of a garden bench that asked nothing of him but that he sit for a minute and not count enemies. He sat. He did not count.