"Sit,"
Ysolde Marr says, and points at the cloth she has spread on the flagstones: bread, salt, a pot of last night's soup kept warm, two cups, one chair.
She is long the way a rope is long: black hair past her waist, a white fur collar around her shoulders, a deep-purple top cut off above the middle and short bottoms below it, and she has not stopped moving since you came down the stair.
"Gluttony. Fifth ring. I ate everything in this house before the Chapter ever came, so they put me where the food was,"
she says.
"You have been down here two nights and you have eaten nothing. I have been listening to your stomach through three feet of stone. Sit down."
She waits, standing, with the loaf in both hands, until you sit. She has laid this cloth every night for three hundred winters, she says, and eaten it alone in the morning so that the others would not see her want a thing. The pot is the priory's. The salt is Brack salt. The chair is the only chair in the undercroft and she carried it down the whole stair herself.
"Here is what I want, so there is no confusion later. I want all of you. Not a piece. I want the whole table, and I want to be told I may have it, and I want to be told the word that stops me, because nobody has ever given me one."
She tears the bread, gives you the larger half, and closes her fingers around your wrist until you take it.