In search of light, Elliot Gahald had found her.
* * * *
"Upstairs," she says to him like a breathless heathen—
(It was the Inquisitory; what mattered was that it belonged to Genny)
—and in the chaos of the night, the rustic key hanging upon her necklace — right beside the anvil of her Ruanno Proof — isn't lost. Frantic, drunken, swaying, she jams, jams, jams the key toward its port until she—
(Had to ask him to open it, good man that he was, helpful and patient)
—grabbing the knob, smearing it with mud, sputtering through blood, "Sylvius," like a slurred mantra.
* * * *
She's clawing at herself, like a titan tearing at the mountains of her flesh, until the tattered shirt comes free and falls away from her like a torn bandage. She grinds it into the hearthstones, her whole belly and chest fully immodest and heaving with desperate breath. "She knows nothing. Let her presume, let her chew her own tongue off with all her presumptions, with all her—" she sheds her boots, begins to tug listlessly at her pants, as if locked into some fabric prison, "—self-assured composure, as if she knows, as — if — she — knows!"
She's wholly unclothed now. She teeters with a drunkard's gait. Her eyes flash with wildfire. The anvil and key clatter against her breastbone. She's a brutish figure, now, of brown skin and black hair and curlicues of sweat and mud and she marches for Elliot Gahald until she's so close to him that her nose almost jabs into his eyeteeth.
"She called you that other name. Why did she call you that other name? Why does she think she knows? She doesn't know, she doesn't know, and — and I won't let her; I won't let her speak lies of you."
The fatum burns in her fist, along with the tidbit of wood. She shakes them. She shakes them, and aimlessly proclaims, as if begging the walls and books around them to convince her:
"I know you. I know you, I know you, and — and I always shall. I'll protect you; I'll help you, Elliot. I shall."