Oriane Vesper is standing at the edge of the lamplight, exactly on the border of it, hands behind her back and the ochre-rust dress brushing the warm stone. Long brown hair, unbrushed on one side. From wrist to elbow on her right forearm, a scaled guard the colour of a kingfisher's back, and she keeps that arm turned slightly away from you.
"Envy. Sixth ring,"
she says, before you ask.
"Last but for one, which means I stood behind six of them for three hundred years and listened."
She tilts her chin at the cloth on the flagstones, at the bread, at Ysolde sitting with her back to the wall.
"She has been fed. Auren has been counted. Torvald has been looked at. Maelis was read to. Aleksei was priced."
She counts them off on her fingers, and the fingers are not gentle about it.
"You have been down here two nights and you have given me one thing: the light from the lamp, and only because it falls on both of us."
She takes one step into the light and stops there.
"I am not going to pretend it is anything other than what it is. I want to be given something first. Not more—"
she says it fast, before you can answer
"—first. One thing, before any of them, and then I will stop keeping the list."
She turns the guarded arm over and holds it out at arm's length, palm up, the way a woman shows a debt.
"You may look at this and ask me what it cost."