The questions seemed banal, like things covered in dust, the dust shaken free, blown into the air by a heavy but meaningless sigh. Renarr was not born to take sword in hand. The knife in its thin leather sheath at her hip was modest in its pragmatic necessity. She was not yet ready to imagine drawing it. As she walked, unburnished, her skin as yet unblessed by whiteness, soldiers surrounded her, and in the bright light, which rose like another world, a world unlike the night before, she was deftly ignored, seen but not seen, and the sight of her, if it yielded anything at all, raised surely little more than a pang of regret – the soft feel of her flesh, the weight she carried that surprised every man she straddled in the dark. None of these things were relevant now.

But there was power to be found nonetheless: the cheap woman as harbinger of regret, making faces turn away, making strong men bend to some task, frowns cascading on their bared brows. The pleasures of flesh made but a sharp fold in the sensations of life, and upon its opposite side that flesh knew pain and terrible damage. In a careless moment, one could mistake the stains of one for the other.

She was the reminder they did not want, not here and not now, and so she walked unaccosted, too solid to be a ghost, but shunned all the same. Of course, this could perhaps be said of all ghosts – the living ones at least – and if so, then the world was full of them, solid but not quite solid enough, and each day they wandered unseen, dreaming of a future moment, imagining their one perfect gesture that would yield in everyone the delicious shock of recognition.

The banner of the command tent, the golden sun in its blue field, was directly ahead now, and as she drew nearer she noted the gap surrounding that tent, as if some invisible barrier occupied the space. No soldiers edged closer and those that she could see, there on the periphery, were all turned away. Moments later, she could make out shouting from within, the harsh bark of anger, bridling: the voice of Vatha Urusander, commander of the Legion and her adoptive father.

Those who might have replied to Urusander spoke in low tones, with murmurs that failed in passing through canvas walls, and so it seemed as if their lord was arguing with himself, like a madman at war with the voices in his head. For a brief instant, Renarr imagined him alone in the command tent. And in she would stride, to witness his decrepit ignominy. She saw herself observing, strangely unaffected, as he swung to her a confused, baffled face. Then the moment passed and she approached the entrance, where the stained flap hung down like a beggar’s blanket.