There followed immediately an interview with Parma which Shebat had petitioned for while still she did not understand what was happening to her, three months before; and which by the day of its occurrence she had given up hope of ever being granted. Until today, she had had the opportunity to call Parma “father” only at those once-weekly breakfasts attended by the most intimate Kerrion family: Ashera and her sons and daughter, herself and the consul general. “You look a far cry from the knobby-kneed waif Marada brought us,” said Parma, raising eyes but not head from the screen on his desk to greet her. “Sit.” She sat opposite him in the old-style armchair before a venerable antique of a desk made from real wood. Like so many things Kerrion, its harkening back to hallowed days of antiquity and the superiority of both taste and breeding thereby implied would have been lost on her when first she came to study in Lorelie.
