It is not, of course, Rolant’s ghost. It is worse. Rolant’s memory is incisive enough—he’d been well and truly born to play at the national pastime of Orlais—but the spirits haunting the Gallows have the sort of knowledge and ability that any noble, any spy, would kill to possess. Artifice is useless; true feelings are plucked as readily as children pluck blackberries, the flesh of them gripped and yanked at greedily for more.

And so the spirit ignores every piece of bait, and grips at the kernel that matters, swirls into Fade-stuff, faceless for a moment before it floats to him in diaphanous skirts, artful ringlets, a lovely smile, the point of her chin balanced coyly on the tip of her fan.

“Ah, mon cher, so clever.” says Alexandrie, looking as she does now, save for the slight translucence, the blur of her edges. The Alexandrie beyond her turns back sharply to stare at her own advance. “You know, I think you trust this face more on a spectre than in flesh. Expect more truth to issue from this mouth. Should you like to hear you are right to? After all, what need have I for lies when the truth is a much better blade? Ask me, and I will pull it from her like a milkmaid skims the cream that cannot help but rise.”

The sudden terror on the solid Alexandrie’s face suggests that despite its addressing, this hell may well be hers.