A professional advisor in the Dragaeran Empire. The Imperial Discreet serves the Emperor or Empress as a close advisor, with absolute and inviolable confidentiality. The Discreet is a confessor first, and an advisor second. The overt request for a Discreet in his official rôle is for the one who retains the Discreet to make a ritualistic confession: "My conscience stabs me". The Discreet then gives a ritual response: "I will bind the wounds". Of all those with knowledge of the Arts of Discretion at the time of the disaster, only Pel is known to have survived.