"Sextus," she says as the praise starts to flow, smug self-satisfaction warring with the sudden urge to crawl somewhere dark and secret and wait for it to be over. It's everything she wants to hear, nothing she deserves, and when he claps his hands and the praise shifts into criticism, it's as good as a reprieve as Harrow thinks she'll get. Humiliating, that such a small thing could come as a relief, but it does.

"It was a brute-force solution," she says, a thing she's said before in justification and excuse, the only explanation she had or cared to provide when the memory of it was restored to her. "But it worked, and it worked beyond my own capacity to understand it. But it...if you spoke to Gideon, you know what it did to her." Palamedes removing his glasses, denying himself even briefly the benefit of their assistance, makes forcing the next few words out easier. "I thought I was making myself her sanctuary, not her prison cell."