[color=D6CC88]"That's not true!"  Amuné stomped her foot.  "The Saints are the Saints, or nobody would worship them!  Maybe they don't do things so we can tell, but they watch over us."  The flare of anger overcame her doubts for a moment, but she looked over at Ethan with an uncertain expression.  "...Right?"

She was shocked when the unpleasant woman said Ethan's friend was dead, and her heart twisted in her chest.  He looked the same way most people did when someone they were close to passed away unexpectedly, and she started to reach for his hand.

Taliya slapped him to break the shock.  The girl didn't protest, since she'd seen her mother do similar things in the past.  But when he tried to push her away the rebel grabbed him and pinned him to the ground.  /That/ wasn't okay.  Amuné grabbed grabbed for her and tried to pull her off, then aimed a kick at the woman's shin.  "Hey!  Get off him!  You leave Ethan alone, you big meanie!" she cried, not that her efforts made a great deal of difference.  It didn't matter.  Ethan was hurting and the mean lady was making it worse.  Even her face was mean.  When the woman finally let Ethan up, Amuné scowled up at her with all the indignant anger a child might muster, before giving Ethan a hug.

"You be quiet!" she told the other Dimuran when he added his two coppers.  "How would you know whether they were friends or not?  If Cedric was important to him?  So he kept your secret, but that doesn't mean he and Ethan weren't close."  She was so angry at these people who didn't care at all about how they might hurt someone.  At the Church for not being what it should be, at the people who kept chasing them, at everyone in her village that had tried to hurt her -- that had succeeded in hurting her daddy and making it so that she needed to run away.  Her own eyes were full of tears born of sympathy for her friend's loss and the hurt over everything they'd been through.  "Maybe it's easy for you to just move on.  Maybe you've forgotten how much it hurt -- maybe it didn't hurt you the same.  But you have no right!"

She turned enough to narrow her eyes at Kensen without pulling away, as if she could shut him up the same way her mommy could make people be quiet even if they were in the middle of an argument.  The woman had a way of looking at a person that cut through protests, and she could somehow make herself heard without even yelling, her voice soft but forceful.  Amuné remembered how much more effective that tone was than shouts, and she tried to mimic it as well, without any success.

"You have no right!" she repeated.  "None!  If someone is hurting, you help or you stay out of the way so someone else can."  The final sentence was one her mommy always said, one she'd had to learn by heart before she was permitted to watch her mother work.  "You're not helping, so [I]be quiet[/I]."[/color]