Much as Petrana can appreciate the need and desire to fill in the gaps of one's history - hasn't she despaired over how little of magic could be saved from the church's fires? - it is little more for her here than an abstract idea, the history of a people whose present she knows even less of. It's hard to muster much excitement or interest at the prospect of what they might find behind those possessed corpses when she's stuck on the possessed corpses part of what Ellana's just said, falling back a step without her own say-so, an instinct.

Marius had taught her magic to protect her, but that protection had always been in buying her time, in a last ditch effort, in the hope that if she were pressed to the wall she would have a means to escape. It had been heating the water around them when she clutched Veda to her chest, hiding beneath a pier with her hand over her daughter's mouth and listening to the heavy boots overhead - it had been flinging a handful of fire at the drapes on her way out a window and onto her horse below, kicking it into a gallop before she'd properly got her seat.

It's never meant fighting for her life. She finds herself in no particular hurry to rush forward -

though she'll follow rather than be left behind.