Talon Pryce

Beside Corin Ashby, "as always", and the one of the pair who keeps looking.

The introduction

Ch. 258, across a courtyard, with no dialogue at all.

Corin's glance at Arthur's table is "the particular practiced disinterest of someone who wanted it clearly understood that he had noticed something and equally clearly understood that he did not care to comment on it".

Talon's is different, and the chapter spends more words on it:

Talon, beside him, held the look a moment longer. There was something in his expression that Arthur couldn't quite place, not quite curiosity and not quite judgment, something closer to simple observation, the particular attention of someone cataloging information without yet deciding what to do with it.

Then he says something to Corin "that made the other boy's mouth curve into a thin, unreadable smile".

That is the entirety of his first appearance. He watches, and he is not hostile, and the chapter declines to say what he is.

He recalculates too

Ch. 260, after the duel. Corin leaves the ring and Talon looks back once.

something in his expression that had not been there before the duel began, a small, private recalculation quietly taking place behind otherwise unreadable features.

He said nothing. He simply looked, and then followed Corin from the yard.

Not from the yard: the duels from the same slate go on, and in ch. 263 Sutton calls Talon to fight Mira while Corin watches from the sidelines. The archive's corrected edition of ch. 260 has "from the ring". The line is still wrong on Wattpad.

His one line in the chapter is to Corin, before it starts:

TLN: That should be interesting.

Two appearances, two long looks, three words of dialogue. The saga is deliberately withholding him.

He forfeits rather than hit Mira

Ch. 263. Sutton pairs him against Mira, who holds a practice sword "with the particular loose, uncertain grip of someone who had spent considerably more time reading about combat than practicing it".

Elsie calls it before it starts:

ELS: Talon's never once looked at her without going slightly soft in the face. Watch.

He does not move at all.

MRA: You're supposed to attack. TLN: I know. MRA: Then why aren't you. TLN: I can't. [...] I don't want to hit you.

TLN: You can win. I concede.

He does not hedge it when pressed:

MRA: You're supposed to try. TLN: I did try. I tried very hard, for about four seconds, to imagine swinging a sword at you, and I found I simply couldn't manage it.

MRA: You could at least pretend. TLN: I'm not very good at pretending. It's rather a flaw of mine.

And he takes the grade for it:

SUT: Pryce. This is a graded exercise. TLN: I understand, sir. I accept whatever grade that earns me. I still can't do it.

Mira walks past him "with her cheeks faintly, unmistakably pink, and did not look back to see the small, helpless smile Talon wore as he watched her go".

This is the first time he says anything of substance, and it is a refusal.

Why he stands beside Corin

Ch. 272, on the rooftop, is the first time he explains himself.

TLN: I've spent most of my life standing beside Corin. Watching people look at him first, always, the way people look at anyone born into something enormous. I don't resent it. I chose it, in a way, choosing to stay close to someone who was always going to be looked at before I was.

And why Mira:

TLN: You're the first person here who didn't look at either of us first. You looked past both of us, mostly, the way you look past most things, and I found I didn't mind it. I found I rather liked it, actually, being someone you had to be coaxed into noticing rather than someone noticed automatically because of who I stand beside.

His full answer for the ch. 263 concession:

TLN: I think, somewhere in the middle of that duel, I understood that hurting you, even in play, even with a padded blade, would have meant treating you like everyone else treats you. Like something to be handled carefully from a distance, or overcome, or managed. I didn't want to be one more person who approached you that way.

He admits the following without apology:

TLN: I followed you. Twice. [...] I got tired of pretending I didn't know where you disappeared to most evenings. MRA: You could have just asked. TLN: Would you have said yes? MRA: Probably not. TLN: There you go, then.

He waits

Ch. 297. He takes Mira to a cat cafe, admits he has been twice alone, and does not explain why she is the person he wanted to bring.

He never asks her what she is. When she tells him anyway, he says why:

TLN: I've been deliberately not asking for a while now, actually. [...] Because you'd tell me when you wanted to. And you did. That seemed considerably better than pressing for it earlier and getting something you'd rather not have given.

Her reaction is the same one she had on the rooftop:

the particular disorienting sensation of being handled correctly by someone who seemed to require no instruction on how to do it.

And he asks for the chess game:

MRA: I sacrificed a rook. On the twenty-fourth move. TLN: Is that impressive? MRA: Extremely. TLN: Then tell me about it properly. I'd like to hear it.

Ch. 328

First to act, before anybody has finished shouting, and the only line in the chapter in full capitals:

TLN: BEHIND IT. EVERYONE BEHIND IT.

He is already moving as he says it, "catching Finn's arm and Briar's collar and putting both of them bodily behind the stone".

He is also the one who reports Yseult honestly rather than gently:

TLN: She's finished. MRA: How finished? TLN: Mira, she's on the floor.

And when Mira, standing alone on open stone in front of a thing she has just talked down, asks for somebody to come and stand near her:

Talon was there before she finished the sentence.

Four volumes of being patient at a distance, and the one time she asks, there is no distance left to cross.

Beckwith

Ch. 321 to ch. 323. He is one of the eight sent to a village of forty buildings with no list and nobody checking on them. See Beckwith.

Ch. 329: the arm, and the ten minutes

Two things, both of which he does without comment.

Coming down off the hill he and Corin take Yseult in turns, "one on each side for the steep sections and one carrying her outright across the loose scree above the high pasture".

And Mira, who insists on walking, walks the whole way with his hand closed around her upper arm and does not once suggest he let go.

That evening she eats something and goes up, and he goes up ten minutes later, "and had been extremely casual about the interval, which fooled nobody and was not, Arthur thought, entirely meant to".

Ch. 330: the chapter is named after him and he says twenty words in it

Mira tells the long table what she is. Seven people hear it for the first time. Elsie is the one who works out what that means about the eighth, "without any particular emphasis, which is how she said everything".

ELS: Talon didn't ask.

Everyone looked at Talon. Talon looked back with the unbothered composure of a person who had been waiting some time for exactly this.

TLN: No. ELS: You knew. TLN: Yes. ELS: How long? TLN: A while.

He did not elaborate, and it became apparent, over the next several seconds and with no assistance from him whatsoever, that he was not going to.

BRR: How long is a while, Talon. TLN: A while, Briar.

He never says how long. Ch. 297 has him tell Mira "I've been deliberately not asking for a while now, actually", and that is still the whole of it from him. Mira is the one who puts a date on it:

MRA: He's been deliberately not asking things since before the harvest market.

The harvest market is ch. 269. So it starts before the rooftop in ch. 272, which is the first time she told him anything about herself at all, and twenty-eight chapters before the cat cafe where he explained the habit to her.

The line

TLN: I've been deliberately not asking things my entire life. You're the first person who's noticed.

That is the largest thing the saga has said about him, and it reframes everything above it. Ch. 297 reads as patience extended to one person who needed it. This says it is not a courtesy at all, it is how he is, and "most of my life standing beside Corin" in ch. 272 is the same fact seen from the outside. Nobody had noticed until somebody who has spent her whole life being handled carefully was handled correctly and knew the difference.

Arthur, watching Mira rather than Talon, reads her face:

probably the closest thing to being safe that a person like her ever got: seven people finding out at once that somebody had known for months and had simply never once mentioned it to any of them.

The chapter is named for him. "The Only One Who Didn't Ask" is the title, and his entire part in it is one refusal, four one-word answers and two sentences.

Ch. 332: he says the thing nobody has said

Ch. 330 is about what he does not ask. This is the one time in the saga he asks, and it costs him more than any of the not-asking did.

Twelve weeks after the Trial of Power, on the last night, with the village gone home and the fourth lamp lit, he puts his cup down and looks across the table at Corin.

TLN: Corin. COR: Mm. TLN: We're going back tomorrow. COR: I'm aware. TLN: I'd rather we had this here than there.

The timing is the whole of the thought. Four hours from Solmere, on the last night, in a room where nobody is anybody's family name. Arthur is surprised it is Talon and then, an hour later, is not.

TLN: You put a man face-down on the ground in front of four hundred people and told him what he was, and then you told them, and Sutton had to stop you. And nobody has said one word about it for twelve weeks, and I've not said anything because I've never once had to say anything to you before and I don't know how it's done. COR: You're doing it adequately. TLN: I'm doing it terribly. I've been rehearsing it since the beck.

Since the beck is ch. 329 at the earliest, so he has been carrying it for the whole back half of the week.

This is ch. 272 turned round. There he told Mira he had spent most of his life standing beside Corin and had chosen it, and that he did not resent being looked at second. Standing beside somebody is also the position from which nobody ever has to say anything hard to them, and twelve weeks of that is what he is ending.

He does not push it further than it needs to go. When Corin finishes, "Talon nodded once and picked his cup back up, and that was the whole of it".

His last line in the exchange is the one that refuses Corin the old exemption:

COR: I simply assumed that whatever I did would be read charitably, because it always has been. TLN: It's not going to be, now. COR: No. Nor should it.

Ch. 333: the arrangement

He walks the eastern road next to Mira, and the chapter gives it one clause: "Mira walked next to Talon. Nobody remarked on it, which had become the arrangement."

Castelgard for the summer with Corin.

Ch. 335: the longer goodbye

He leaves with Corin at eight, and takes longer over it, "because Talon's always did".

a genuinely startling hug for Mira that she permitted and then stood very still through, and a quiet word to her that Arthur did not hear and did not ask about.

The archive does not have the word and will not guess at it.