It's an awful thing. Not that there'd been a weapon come suddenly into his hand - that is incidental, is the most reasonable response imaginable. Awful that her skin had produced the armour at all, and that it had shocked the man into dropping something precious. That's worth apologising for, and nevermind an old instinct which reckons that apologies are a gateway to concessions and subordination. It's only one of many rules suspended since Lentham's arrival, for no reason but that the conversation interests and Ariane means to be unimpeded as she follows where it might lead.
She has not, for instance, yet inquired after Lentham's business here.
Everything else is simply more important, until he makes a request of her - the tiniest thing - and the blackjack reappears as a means for murder. Until they make that short, cold return to the mundane and the expected and things conclude as such things generally do. It is possible to accept such a possibility while all the same hoping quietly against it. Why, she's been doing precisely that since the man first approached her stables.
"No big secret." Now, with the flask recovered by his hand and a towel in hers. Old custom has the dark hair grown past her hips, and toweling away the worst of its damp is a necessary chore if she doesn't care to freeze underneath its weight. No big secret, because she hadn't attempted to make it one. Hadn't intended to leave at all, except that one day they'd ridden so far and -
What a thing he asks.
"That urge ... was gone long before I left." With the pale eyes set easy upon him then, and some slight tilt of the shoulder. "You know my name - Detecting Constable. You know the words that go with it, mn? Traitor. Insuh-rectionist. Compromised." The damage done to her face might be turned away from him, but not the way it tugs at her lips when she smiles just so. "I think on how it must seem, that moment." Black wings against the brilliant sky; a girl and her dragon, the world so small beneath. "So I tell you this thing, Detecting: that I was angry. You had friends down there - but so did I. Amongst your constables, amongst Janeiro - and the men heading both besides. I was angry - that it had come to this, when it needn't have. That good men would die, but not for good cause. That it was murder, instead of talk - as a consequence of politics." The lips curl; cold derision, fleeting. "You tell me: for how long do you hold your anger? No. I stepped back, that day."
Many words. An incomplete answer. Perhaps it may suffice all the same. And in any case, there's an explanation of his own forthcoming; one which has stilled her hands and quieted her eyes. "You were there," she's murmured, when her mouth proves willing to shape words at all. "But not amongst those I met." Her question is obvious; is inevitable. He knows it's coming.
"Who did you hunt?"