Orpiment

Role Lessor of the Vale of Quillet Status alive Age older than the lease, by her own account considerably

The dragon is the yellow of the old painters’ pigment she is named for, fading to rose at the throat, and she is large enough that when she lay along the roof of the Wool Exchange her tail hung down into Tanner’s Row. She speaks in complete sentences with subordinate clauses. She calls everyone in the vale “tenant,” including Queen Hesper.

What she is like

Orpiment is courteous the way a contract is courteous: every word means exactly what it says, and nothing more has been promised. She does not threaten. When the Chancellor offered her a chest of crowns in the square she thanked him, declined, and observed that she had not been asked for gold and had not asked for any. She has been patient for three hundred years and plans to be patient for another forty days.

She is curious about small made things. She asked Odda Quarrel what a bell was for, listened to the whole answer, and then asked whether it could play a tune.

What she wants

The rent, exactly as the lease states it, delivered at the Lammas moon of Lease Year 300. She will not say what it is. “A tenant who must be told the rent,” she said, “has not read the lease.” If the rent is paid, she says, the lease provides for what happens next. If it is not, the lease has a clause for that too, and she has declined to say what it is in front of children.

Dealings with the Wardens

• Session 1. Landed on the Wool Exchange at the Midsummer Fair, read the term and the due date aloud, and gave the Crown until the Lammas moon. Named Kit Farrow “tenant” and gave him a scale as a receipt.
• Session 2. Not seen. The Tally Cliffs rang with something like humming for most of the afternoon.
• Session 3. Seen from the Sallow Hills, circling the cliffs at dusk, twice.