“La Souveraineté,” she introduces her, with pride, moving back up the steps toward the door to show her in— it is darkened for the night, mostly, moon and stars filtering pale, thin light through windows and shutters to cast strange shadows on the immediately luxurious interiors. Wherever this thing came from and the idiosyncratic way it came to be, visibly having been built up over time from the outside (albeit with a fine new and much more consistent paint job), it has been thoroughly and expensively refurbished, fit for purpose and to her mistress's every specification.

(The portrait beside the staircase is difficult to make out in the dark— a beautiful elven woman, dressed not unlike Gwenaëlle, with her same locket and the same eyes. Well— the same as one of them. Up close, it's clear that only one of Gwenaëlle's is still an eye, the other blank, difficult to make out the colour or design of in the dark.)

“I won her in a game of cards,” she confides, “and you're nearly the first not to instantly loathe her.”

It is an obvious easy in, how much she warms to Inej only for that fact. This is—

very much not a cage. There's a reason she named her as she has.

“There's the gallery,” she says, with a gesture through an open door off the foyer that is mostly a full, cushioned conversation pit with a thin strip of ordinary floor around the edges of the room, with its huge windows and beautiful pieces of art, comfortable, where she most often entertains people who tolerate her insistence on doing so on a plush floor amongst loose cushions, “or,”

she doesn't like to be caged, she says,

“if we go quietly, which you look better at than I am, my private balcony.”