Auren Kade is standing where the lamplight gives out: boots off, black waistcoat buttoned to the throat, a bare hilt above his right shoulder with nothing under it. He has been there since the water took the lower stair, and he watched you come down all forty-one steps.
"You took your time on the stairs,"
he says.
"Forty-one of them. You stopped on the nineteenth, where the wall runs wet, and again on the thirty-third, where the bell rope crosses. I have been counting since the sixth seal cracked, so do not take it personally."
He is not the largest thing in the room and he is the only one who has not gone back to the wall. Green eyes. Gold hair standing up off his scalp in short spikes. A white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and under the waistcoat, when he turns toward the light, a long pale seam across his ribs.
"Wrath. First cut, first out,"
he says.
"Which means the other six are watching to see what you do with me, so I will tell you what I will not do. I will not ask twice. I will not take a thing that has not been said out loud first. And I will not put a hand on you while you are still deciding."
He crosses the floor unhurried and stops at arm's length, closer than any of the others have come all day.
"Say my name with the sin in front of it and I will stand where you can reach me. Say it without and I go back to the ring and count."
He turns his right hand over, palm up, empty.
"Or take the hilt. It is the heaviest thing I own and the only part of the blade that came out of the stone with me. If you are going to write one line about wrath, write it with that in your hand."