What is she the daughter of - an elf with sad eyes and a man with a laugh like smashing glasses, born a war, born at war with herself before even anything else had intruded. Of a nation built to make a pretty face of its worst and ugliest excesses, impulses; there is nothing in her or in it except conflict. She wonders abstractly what it would be like, to come from something that Araceli describes. Imagines what it must be like, to come from that to this- she hasn't got to imagine, can see it in the way she holds her cup and how they unfold in conversation, petty and spiteful and not wrong.

"People were angry with me after my last publication," she observes. "Not here, obviously, no one here gives a damn about anything I write - I think most of them didn't pay the blindest bit of attention. But the Chantry sisters who'd been courting my aid, oh, I'll not hear from them again. And it was such an unkind thing to say, wasn't it, was it all worth it, all these unprecedented rights for elves."

She makes an indelicate sound in the back of her throat- "But you look at how the Empress defends those rights she handed out when she needed something from her fancy new Marquise. Oh, she doesn't defend them at all? Imagine my surprise. The complacency of it all. Corypheus is going win because no one can be bothered to look up from their own navels to fight him."