"Here I am instead," Krem said with a little smile. There was so much in between his mother's various instances on his marriage and arriving in Darrow, but Krem wasn't sure how much of that was really important. How much of it was worth discussing.

He ate quietly a moment more, sipped his wine, grabbed a second slice of bread and hummed a compliment.

There were words on his tongue. Questions, curiosities. He needed to stop depending on liquid courage for any of it, but he couldn't find himself avoiding the wine, for the moment, as he tried to navigate the order of his words.