"Returning to Lancival is like feeling your mother's arms enfolding you."  So had said a long-dead sister, and despite the sentimentality of that, Delia admitted its truth.  Other sisters had said similar sentiments.  One likened the feeling of going back to Lancival to resting her head on her mother's breast.  This Delia regarded as sickly sentimentality - and, also, admitted of its truth.  Her own mother had died when she was young, a tragedy she believed she had surmounted.

Lancival.  Lancival of the red roofs and the ivy-clad walls.  Lancival of the calmness and the peace, the singing and the quietness and the harsh banging of steel on steel and the panting exertions of girls in combat.  Lancival of the Disciplines known only to women.  Lancival of the Whip.  Lancival of the Claw.

Not because she was the Empress of Vallia but because she was an initiate of the SOR of a certain exaltedness Delia possessed her own room in one of the collegiate buildings.  A mere cubbyhole, it contained a narrow bed, a set of bookshelves, a dressing table with brushes and combs of plain wood and bristle unadorned and decorated with not a single stroke from a paintbrush, a single design from a chisel.  A wardrobe held various robes required by the Order, a selection of undergarments of the most Spartan kind, sandals and fighting boots, a cloak and an enveloping black leather hat with a black band.  The sheets were plain yellow, the pillowslip plain yellow, the towels draped over the washbasin plain yellow.  The mirror set above the dressing table was not quite large enough to reflect all of her face at the same time.  She was adept at tilting her proud and imperious head about, like a gawky girl, to see what was necessary to see.

This room was one of a double row along a third-story corridor, each cubbyhole like its neighbor as a pea in a pod.  This particular room had once been occupied by a sister of the SOR, now long dead, renowned in the sorority's annals as Velda the Tempestuous.

The stories clustered about Velda emphasized the usual normality of her character, oven her sweetness of personality.  The stories told those who listened that when Velda met injustice she could not control her temper.  Her temper was fierce, vicious, intemperate.  A mistress of the Claw and Whip, no accurate tally had been kept of the unseemly wights she bad dispatched to the Ice Floes of Sicce, she clawed and slashed them all indifferently if they offended her keen sense of justice.

This room was, therefore, always known as Velda's Room.

Just why the mistress had seen fit to assign Velda's Room to Delia of Delphond puzzled Delia.  Now, she no longer concerned herself over that order of puzzlement.  The room represented a haven at certain times, a sense of penitence, a place where she might strip away everything that was not Delia.

She was always glad and relieved to sink down on the narrow bed in her room at Lancival, and always ready and relieved to close the door upon that room and leave to go about her business in the wider world.

High on one wall hung a portrait of Velda the Tempestuous.  It showed her in the full regalia of white leathers, long-legged, scowling of face, the Whip coiled along her arm, the Claw extended menacingly.  Her rapier and left-hand dagger snugged about a narrow waist.  Her hips flared in her arrogant, menacing pose.  Her long white leather boots were mud-splashed.  This small touch had always to Delia brought the Image of Velda alive, as though the sister could not he dead but ready to answer the summons to prayer, to be met in the refectory, to be engaged in discussion at any of the formal functions of the SOR.

The Sisters of the Rose were mindful of tradition, and looked to the future, and kept themselves secret in the world in which they labored.

Beside the head of the bed stood a heavy wooden chest on legs which, in that austere room, were incongruously carved into the likenesses of rose trellises.  The doors in the front of the chest were locked.  The top supported a few essential items of toiletries.