Temn’s niece Martisset will be extended the offer once more;  I think that he has an odd partiality to her, in spite of her past refusal of his projects.

Clever, if she meant to take power. Each time he offers her more, because her adamant refusal means that she has will, and if that will not be opposed to his but combined, great things can be accomplished.

I see her cold closed face, aloof as the ice and much its color, and I think of the fanatics of the Sacred Conspiracy. I do not think that he will succeed. She will carry the banner of her own notions unto death, in the teeth of opposition and for the sheer joy of it. Hers is not the face of a scholar but a warrior — unlike that silent lieutenant of hers, the stocky dark woman with the bland expression, who stands at a very great distance from anything contemporary. Now that is a scholar, be she historian or archaeologist, for I recognize her look, that thousand-yard stare into the dead past, because it speaks what my face would, if it still spoke the same language as mortals.

***

Character interview with the Immortal of T-7, from NaNo 2013, Inside the Jump. Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.