Kiriona misses the Ninth House like a neglected child misses their parents
All i’m saying it’s that maybe, just maybe, Kiriona has face paint somewhere in her rooms. And sometimes - it’s just the muscular memory, she tells herself - she does the Ninth’s face paint, bites her cheeks’ interior as she paints them hollow with black, so the colour’s uniform. The white it’s tricky, easy to smudge, as Harrow used to say. And she ends the face paint. It’s not perfect, in fact it’s pretty wanky, but it looks similars to Agliamede’s.
This is all she ever wanted, she reminds herself, this is her dream life, not the Ninth, with their dying nuns and their Reverent Daughter and dead bodies.
She takes the paint off.