Yseult is as streaked with blood and soot as any of the living, dull smears across her face (as if she's tried to wipe it clean with a dirty sleeve) cut through by a single vibrant red trickle of dried blood from hairline to jaw. One sleeve has been rent by dracolisk acid, the edges of the holes bleached grey-white beneath later stains, glimpses of burnt skin beneath. At times she may be caught moving gingerly, favoring a hip, but she doesn't go looking for treatment.

When the others arrive, the pyres for the villagers' dead are already burning. Yseult is where she would be expected to be: in the center of things, delegating tasks as simply as possible, helping surviving villagers load the wagon that will take them on to a safer town, collecting what supplies and personal belongings can be salvaged from the remains of the camp. Though this latest round of smoke has reduced her voice to a painfully hoarse crackle, she will direct the reinforcements, too—whether that is to the location of a particular body or to a task, though the to-do list is the shorter of the two.

If anyone had been asked to guess what form Yseult's grief might take, the answer would likely have been: quiet, contained, buried beneath work. And so it is. There is light beneath her office door at nearly all hours, but there always has been. She is often found at her desk, neatly dressed, hair braided, a report before her, a pen in hand, as always. Sometimes it looks as if nothing has changed. Other days she may be caught: with eyes too red and shadowed to be fully cosmeticked away even by her powers of disguise, or even, once or twice, asleep at her desk with head pillowed on arms or curled up on the sofa by the window, a gray tabby cat by her shins.

She eats in the dining hall, never without a report to read as she consumes whatever is on offer. She works on the training grounds, throwing knives by the dozen into a target or hitting a dummy with a sword until she can't lift her arms. She visits the eyrie to tend to Pockets and Hugo, she collects the mail in her pigeonhole, she leads the division's biweekly meeting and remains in the workroom to address any questions or concerns, all the normal steps in her routine carried out as expected. Sometimes, on hot nights, she can be found up on the ramparts or the roof of a tower, laid back on the stones with her feet dangling and her face turned to the sea breeze.

She has always maintained a professional reserve—she is polite, approachable but not chatty, and she remains that now. Her office door is open more often than not, she is responsive to agents by crystal, will discuss reports and plan missions and answer questions. She plays the role of Scoutmaster as well as ever, and she has always been difficult to read. But despite that, despite the insistence on business as usual, it's not hard, actually, to see the difference in her. Being inscrutable requires the presence of something hidden beneath the surface, hinted at but held, tantalizingly, just out of reach. Whatever that was is gone, a personality made conspicuous only now by its absence.