Pel is starting to look neutral in a way Beleth will never have seen--almost glassy and grey, the evenness of her voice calculated to the microsecond. But she does not look angry. She does not look numb or superior. She puts on no airs. She is simply speaking to Beleth.

"You would assume?" she asks. "But you would not ask. You never have. You have spoken to me as if I left the clan without a plan. As if I went into this--the Inquisition, leaving the clan, even motherhood--without thinking it through. That my life, my child, is just a little less pathetic than it could be because 'at least it's an elf.' And at the moment you said that, you were pursuing a human."