That was the woman sitting at the end of Silas Webb's bar, watching the door, while a boy named Cain decided to give the people a show.
Cain reached for her.
He did it the way he did everything, with total confidence and no thought at all. He closed his hand around her upper arm to haul her off the stool, to walk her to the door, to give the camera its ending.
"Show's over," he said. "Out."
What happened next, the men in the Holdfast would describe differently for years. But they would all agree on the timing of it, which was no time at all.
The woman did not pull away. She did not stiffen. She let him take her arm, and in the same instant her other hand came off the bar and closed around his wrist.
It was not a fast motion. That was the part that stayed with them. It was not a strike or a twist or anything they had a name for. It was simply that her hand was suddenly around his wrist, and his hand could not move. And the harder he pulled, the more completely it could not move, as if his arm had been set into the wall of the building itself.
There was no strain in her face.
Her grip closed once, all the way to a place past where a strong man's grip stops, and held there for one full second. Long enough for Cain to understand, in the animal part of him that is older than confidence, that the woman could break the bones in his forearm the way a person snaps kindling, and was choosing, deliberately, not to.
Then she let go.
She set his wrist down gently, the way you set down something that does not belong to you. And she looked at him with those flat gray eyes, and she still did not raise her voice.
"Don't," she said.
Cain stepped back.
He laughed, too loud, too quick, and shook his arm out, and said something to the room about the grip on the old contractor. And the room laughed with him, because the room needed to.
But the laugh did not reach his eyes, and his eyes did not leave her. A small, cold doubt had opened in him that all his certainty could not quite paper over. He had felt the strength in that hand. There was no story he could tell himself that explained it.