"Does it accept me?" she repeats, and jerks her head to the side as if struck by some unseen palm. "Whether or not it accepts me is hardly my concern. What matters is that I accept it. What I talk for is my perception of it, and that alone. At the times it must, it hates me, and I can feel that burn acutely. And through it, I feel the pulse of the place.
"Its heartbeat hasn't changed, not since I left, and not since I returned. Always the same," Gloria said. "Always the same." The phrase fell from her lips like water, having neither body nor passion. She crossed her arms, almost as if suffering a sudden chill. She did not look at him. The missing eye, a void, was better left an imaginary fixture of that face she knew so well. "Valor sought, Elliot, or valor awarded? Whose life did you save?"
She milled about as if trying to find something, touching a knuckle to her lips. Staring at the ground. Half her attention for him. Half her attention buried into the world. ...most of my years of s— rang like a ball-bearing rattled in a bedside pitcher. He knew it. He knew it. Was it worth digging a thumb even deeper to peel it out, to pop out the rest of the world like the wet tongue of an oyster to be sucked out and swallowed? For what purpose. Satisfaction? Closure? Some sense of I told you?
No victories without blood. That's what Raf Ironback taught her. No easy victories.
Finally, she stopped. Her toe jabbed into the ground. "There."
A moment later, she'd squatted to dig the object out of the soil. The clumsy archaeology took no finesse. With its leather dry-rotted and its crossguard chewed nearly to crumbles by rust, the sword — a rusted practice blade, abandoned during the previous Guard's tenure in these fields — might as well have been a relic of a thousand years ago, let alone four or five. She peeled it out of the soil, lay it across her knee, and then looked up to the horizon of the town and the world beyond.
"There are little men and little women who — who thirst to know what valor is, and our little world needs good guides, good teachers, and good leaders. Time falls away. We used to be children. And now," she said, "we're not."
She dropped the moldering sword at his feet.
"What you never were, even then, was cruel. Or unkind. Or unfair. Whatever you do, I beg you not to bury those gifts in Snowstill."