Orenna is the last person in the Blood Mountains who can lawfully draw the day's light, and she inherited the right the old way, by office rather than election. Among the Aureum the priests were glass-tenders, and a tender's authority was a maintenance schedule before it was anything else. Orenna's line tended the chain that ended at Candelum back when the chain still ran. When the resistance found the sealed hall and the reserve inside it, the question of who held the basin answered itself: she was the only one left who could recite the hall's discipline, name its mirrors, and decant a measure without spoiling it. She leads the Last Lamp because she controls the tap, and she controls the tap because of a vow her family kept for an age after it stopped paying.
She is not a warlord and does not pretend to be. What she does is arithmetic. Every measure of light drawn from Candelum's basin is a measure the reserve will never hold again, so Orenna spends the day's ration the way a besieged garrison spends its last grain: on the people and the workings that keep the resistance alive one more season, and on nothing that merely feels like victory. This makes her unpopular with the fighters who want the light turned into weapons and the night taken back. She tells them the reserve is larger than it is, to keep them patient. It is one of two lies she runs, and the smaller one.
We do not own the light. We were never told we would have it forever. We were told to keep it moving for as long as it lasted, and it has not lasted, and we are still here. That is the whole of my office. — Orenna, to the fighting wing of the Last Lamp
The larger thing she carries is a back-channel she cannot tell her own people about. A Chimean legion officer holds the surface above her, and she has begun trading with him. The point of it is not peace, and it will not win the mountains back. The Bloodlings have started taking her tunnel-runners and his mine-officers with the same indifference, and the two of them are the only powers in the range willing to admit the deep has become a third enemy that answers to neither. She trusts him exactly as far as the threat lasts. She has not decided what she does when it stops. See the Chimean commander Toben Ashling and the Last Lamp for the shape of that arrangement.