Sabra

Sabra was the bright star of the Red House, the pale stone house behind the old glassworks where the Velvet Veil kept its quietest rooms. She had shaved one side of her head and painted a thin gold line from her temple to the hinge of her jaw, and she moved as though she had never once wondered what a room thought of her. She kissed people when she had been drinking. She told a merchant who put his hand where it was not wanted that he had the manners of a goat, so loudly that the whole room heard. She was never embarrassed by anything, and rooms watched her the way courts watch a ruler.

Carisse had found her at seventeen in a laundry by the tanneries, folding sheets for a lodging house, and told her she had a good face. Everything Sabra had afterwards — the bracelets up both arms, the rooms, the nights — had come from Carisse, and Sabra said so, and meant it as praise. Carisse kept the dark liquor locked away from her, and Sabra stole the key.

To Zarina, calling herself Sera, she was everything the palace had made impossible: fearless, careless, entirely awake. It was Sabra who first held out the tray of vials in the mirror room, and Sabra who later gave her one to take home, for the bad days. She never took a coin for them.

Her last winter she was brighter and louder and thinner than anyone had known her. She died in the mirror room on a quiet Thursday, lying between the candles where she so often lay, and the doctor who never asked questions did not ask any. Her wake became a party by midnight, and half the house painted her gold line on their own faces.

She was twenty-four. Nobody at the Red House had ever thought to ask.