A decent mid-piece for "scene three". Kerr establishes an entertaining, though none too complex, level of interpersonal interaction between the characters and continues to give them a fairly believable depth, though she does tend to slip on small details, like remembering what color a characters eyes were in the last novel. She also has the irritating tendency to restate things that have already been well-established in previous books, but that's par for the course in fantasy. Not great literature, but I'm still enjoying it.