Mathieu looks nothing like his designation. Tall and slender, he has red hair and blue eyes, with a freckled complexion that makes you think of warm summer days spent fishing or swimming at the local hollow.

But that only lasts until you look into his eyes, and find yourself in danger of freezing. Mathieu is an expert at his job, a force of nature, like the blizzard, in bed, but his emotions are his own.

How he ended up in the Palace is unknown to all his clients, for he refuses to answer any questions about his life before. His job is to take care of their needs, and he does only that. And after they leave through the door to his suite, he choses to forget they ever existed.

His suite has all the austereness of a Japanese zen garden, but the materials are luxurious. Sculptures of the same white marble as the doors line the perimeter of the main room, with a bathing pool at the center. To the left, a door leads to the bedroom where he entertains. The bed is large and round, draped in silver-blue silks, white furs, and canopied in mindnight-blue embroidered with seed pearls and crystals, forming snowflakes falling from a night sky.

To the right, a small, barely visible door leads to his personal rooms, the ones he lives in when not entertaining. The bed is barely large enough for one, and the quilts on it are threadbare and colorful, shelves of books line one wall, and a rack holds several swords that he practices with daily. A small desk in the corner is littered with quills and paper. His personal bathroom is equally small and utilitarian. When he has no clients, these are the rooms he stays in, avoiding the public rooms beyond.

He never speaks to the Palace servants who clean the public rooms and bring him his meals, and they never speak to him.