Talk About Something You Did That Made You Feel Ashamed Of Yourself Afterwards.

Well I can tell you easily what it's not, sugar. It's not the men I've whored myself to. And let me tell you, there are those that would be ashamed. The things I've done to please a man, or let him do to me...well. There aren't many women that could stomach it. The humiliations. The pain sometimes. But I did it. And it's why I was the best. The most expensive whore in all of Terreille. Most men couldn't even meet my asking price.

I knew, the whole time, that I held their lives in my hands, and I took satisfaction from the fact that often, though not always, I ended those lives. But it's not the men I killed I'm ashamed of either. They were men who broke witches. Who used children. I never made a kill that wasn't justified by that. I was an assassin. Not a killer. There is a difference.

It's not...not the lovers I've taken, without payment, or that there have only been two. It's not even that I...that I left him, bags packed and didn't take a knife to him for his treachery.

All of that, and I know there are those who find much of it shameful. But I don't.

No. There's only been one time in my life when I was truly ashamed of myself.

The lover I didn't take. The lover I tried to take. I'd had too much wine and he was just too...if you've seen him you'd know. He breathes sex. He says your name and the world just focuses in on the sound of his voice. It's an art. It's a game. But he plays it better than any man ever to walk any of the three Realms. I was his friend. The person he didn't have to play the game with. His protege. His student. His family. The one person in all the Realms he could be himself with. How he would have been had Dorothea not gotten to him first.

And I tried to seduce him. I asked to have Hayll's Whore between my legs. To dance with the Sadist.

I danced with him all right. And I learned why women would beg for him and curse him to his death in one breath. He left me aching for days with an ache that's never quite erased itself from my memory, never quite been fulfilled. Our friendship changed. Ended almost for fifty years. He didn't trust me anymore. He wasn't Sadi. He was the Sadist and I flinched when I felt him walk through a Territory.

In fear. In sadness.

And in shame.

What do you think when you look in the mirror?

I used to see him. Her memory had faded, but his was all around me, imprinted in the air I breathed, the shadow his mother cast over the Territories. I looked and I saw him in the cast of my skin, the shade of my hair. The way I walked. The way I didn't age. All of it his. My eyes would fly past the green reflected back at them, my hair covering my ears, and all I saw was him. The father I never knew. The father who had my mother killed.

I couldn't remember her, as the decades went by. Her skin a different color. Hair white. Eyes emerald green. She was gone and I had nothing but a memory that faded. I searched for her in the mirror, looked hard, but there were ears and eyes and he took over the rest.

But then I found her again. And in finding her the image in the mirror shifted. I looked on her with adult eyes, and there, when I looked again at myself, there was her nose. Her chin. The very angle and cast of my features were hers. Our size. Our hands. The way she makes a kill, the way she taught me.

And now I look and I see my mother's daughter. I see what I always wanted to, what I searched so hard for.

I see someone she's proud of, and someone that...I can be proud of, too.