POV: siri
Summary
Two days out of Bevalis, Siri sits stunned in the kingdom's finest carriage, an honour guard of twenty soldiers and a steward and serving boys around her, the Idrian hills falling further behind with every rut. Her father has sent her south the way an Idrian princess is supposed to travel — too grandly for her to ride a horse, which is the one thing she would have preferred. Vivenna's purpose has been given to her without warning; the wife of the God King is what she is going to be. Her Royal Locks bleach white at the thought. She curls up on the seat of the carriage and lets the shaking of it blur into her own.
In Bevalis, Vivenna sits decorously across her father's desk and asks him calmly to reconsider. He waves her down. Siri, he says, will do fine — all the treaty really requires is a daughter capable of carrying an heir. He works with visible effort to keep his own Locks from bleeding red, and fails for a moment; Vivenna reads in that failure that he is far more shaken by Siri's departure than he means to admit, and that what he is privately expecting from Hallandren is her sister's death. The plan she was raised for — speak to her husband, use her influence in court, slow or stop the war — has, she realises, been discarded by her father in favour of buying nine more months. She leaves the study obedient, walks through the wooden hallways of the palace without seeming to notice the whispers, and sits on her bed with her hands in her lap to face the fact that her life's preparation has been preserved for nothing.
Siri, several days further south, has shaken off the numbness and is taking it out on a young soldier marching beside the carriage. They are probably already inside Hallandren now — the border is vague, since the two kingdoms were one until the Manywar — and the spring hills have given way to deep grass and then to crowding trees. There are flowers everywhere in colours no Idrian hillside would risk. She would have picked some, except for how the soldiers eye them. The thought eventually reaches her that her honour guard has been pulled from their families with no idea when they will see them again; she resolves to send them home from T'Telir rather than keep twenty men trapped in a city full of Awakeners and Lifeless for nothing. Sending them back will leave her alone there. Her hair whitens at the thought, and she lets it.
Back outside Bevalis, Vivenna picks berries with Fafen, shorn-headed in her monk's white. Fafen cannot really see the problem — Vivenna no longer has to marry a tyrant; she will inherit Idris now in Ridger's place; everyone wins. Vivenna presses her on Siri's fate and watches her sister grudgingly grant the point. The conversation lapses. She knows that Siri will not survive the Hallandren Court of Gods — Siri does not understand backstabbing or false faces or, particularly, the politics of bearing the next God King — and that she has no purpose left in Bevalis except to obey. As she follows Fafen back down the hillside, the shape of an alternative begins to form in her head: she still knows the customs, the people, and the society of Hallandren better than anyone alive in Idris except herself; her sister still needs her; and she is no longer needed here. The plan that is taking shape is not, by any standard her tutors would have recognised, proper.