Ilyne

Ilyne belonged to the Velvet Veil, and she was the only person who ever gave Zarina a plain answer about what the Veil actually did. She was a few years older than Zarina, slight and straight-backed, with short dark hair and a narrow silver chain running from one ear to a cuff higher along it, and she had the stillness of someone used to being the calm person in a room. She was also unhelpful in the ordinary ways: she gave directions to the Red House as behind the old glassworks, and, told there were three, said that she had forgotten that, without smiling.

Asked what the Veil was, she said it was work: somewhere to go, money, help after an arrest, a doctor who would not ask questions. Asked why, she said because people needed help, and did not decorate it. When the Veil took in one of its own, Ilyne was the one who sat with them until they stopped shaking. She poured water instead of wine, unasked, for anyone who looked as if they needed it.

She knew what the inner rooms were, and what was passed round in the mirror room, and she stayed for the good. That was her compromise, and she knew it was one. When Sabra died she was the first to kneel by her, and at the wake that became a party she said only that Sabra had been twenty-four, and went home through the snow.

A year and a half on, it was Ilyne the closure order caught in the Red House on the wrong night, and Ilyne who told Zarina, through the bars of a watch house, what else her warning had been used for.

She was the only one in that house who ever asked Zarina what it was costing her. She asked it once, through the bars of a watch house, and did not believe the answer.