Ansel

Ansel was an actor of the Low Gate company, thin and very young, with a line of old stage paint behind one ear that never quite washed out.

The Velvet Veil first took him in when his landlord found out he was sleeping with another man and put him in the street with his month’s rent kept back. He came to the door of the Red House in tears with his whole life in a sack, and before he had finished telling it Carisse had found him a bed upstairs, Veyra had emptied her pockets and two other people’s into his hand, and Ilyne was sitting beside him on the bottom stair with her shoulder against his. Zarina, still calling herself Sera, watched it happen, and loved the Veil for it. The kindness was real. That was what made the rest so hard to see.

More than a year later he played the Warden of the City in a satire at the Bell Street playhouse, and the watch came to close it, and somebody threw a roof tile down on a young watchman who died of it. The watch’s report named Ansel as the man who had called the crowd on. He had been behind the stage the whole time, in his paint, being sick into a bucket.

The closure order that followed carried a warrant for him, and on the night of the warning he was got out of the city by the Veil — in the same cart, it was said afterwards, as the doorman who had really thrown the tile.

He never learned who had sent the warning, or what else it had been used for. He only ever wanted somebody outside that house to know that he had not thrown anything.