And she had looked at me — a stranger, a woman about to marry into the very family that was destroying her — and decided, in the few seconds it took to fold a scrap of paper, to risk everything she had left to warn me.

She did not know me.

She had no reason to believe I would help her, and every reason to fear I would report the note straight back to Ottavia and bring the punishment down on her.

She wrote it anyway.

It was, I would come to understand, the single bravest thing a person can do inside a cage like hers: to reach through the bars, at enormous risk, for the sake of a stranger she thought she could save even if no one would ever save her.

That note was Yvaine refusing, in the smallest and most dangerous way available to her, to let the Pembrooks make one more victim.