Cassia Arden

Nobody in the Meroveil court remembers hiring Cassia Arden, which is precisely the point. She arrived in the capital as a guest of someone who could not later recall extending the invitation, attended three seasons of salons on an accent no one could place, and left with the floor-plans of two ministries, the marriage-debts of a Magistrate, and the only surviving copy of a treaty annex the Crimson Hand had been told did not exist. She did all of it, by every account that survives, while being looked directly at. People remember the dress. People remember the way the room turned towards her when she laughed. People do not remember her leaving.

Her school is the one the Hand simply files as 'close-work' — a discipline of shadow and edge that the imperial investigators insist must involve a glamour and that Cassia insists is only attention, correctly spent. She moves a room's eyes where she wants them and is elsewhere by the time they return. The Phoenix Verdict the chronicles name after her is the rare engagement she chooses to be seen finishing; she has used it eleven times, each against a target she decided, after review, deserved a witness. The blade-work underneath the beauty is genuinely lethal and genuinely quiet, and the operatives who have trained against her describe the experience, uniformly, as losing track of where she was standing.

What she wants is not in any file the Hand keeps, and the handler who debriefs her after each rotation has stopped asking. She came out of the Meroveil Empire's tactical office before the Hand had her — that much the records agree on — and every operation she plans still reads, to the imperial analysts who study them, like their own doctrine run backward by someone who helped write it. She thanks the handler for each debrief. She corrects, occasionally, his pronunciation. She has never once told him what the Verdict is for.