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Lightsong wakes weak in a silk-draped bedroom in his palace in the Court of Gods of Hallandren, unable, as always, to remember anything of how he died or anything that came before. He has been a Returned god for five years. His high priest Llarimar has assured him that his death was extremely inspiring, noble, grand, heroic; the Iridescent Tones teach that only a death exemplifying the great human virtues earns a Return. Lightsong privately suspects he died of a stomach cramp. He stands; the dizziness is the weekly weakness that a Returned feels in the hours before they feed. Servants drape him in red and gold. Their hair and skin and garments saturate as they enter his aura — the visible signature of his deific BioChroma, enough to fill a thousand people, but he cannot lend or donate any of it; he is a god, not an Awakener, and the only way to give the Breath out would kill him.

Llarimar arrives with his tome and his quill, is rewarded with the freshly-given nickname *Scoot*, and asks the daily question. Lightsong tells him the dream: a beach, a ship leaving without him, the sail and the water both inexplicably red. Llarimar scribbles furiously — the priests always do when their god remembers colours — and Lightsong passes the rest of the audience teasing him about an imaginary version of the dream where the priest danced with a bottle of wine. They leave the bedchamber and pass room to room — hallways being for servants, who run them in a square around the outside — until they reach a small chamber striped with deep, true blues and greens and reds. In its centre stands a child a few years old, terrified, ringed by encouraging priests in red and gold robes. Lightsong kneels, takes her face in his oversized hands, and waits while she stammers out the Command: my life to yours, my Breath become yours. Her Breath flows up his arm and into him. The dizziness lifts. The colour goes out of her — hair, lips, eyes, cheeks — and she walks out a Drab for life, paid for. He has another week of being a god.

They go on to the Offerings hall, a long white room hung with paintings and poems sent by patrons of the city. He reviews them at a god's pace, lesser priests outside the door transcribing each word: the patron will receive an augury along with the god's exact phrasing. Most are forgettable — a jungle scene; a peasant's poem labouring the artisan's script's coloured-dot alphabet, the lazy choice of someone too poor for a real poet — and Lightsong reviews each as honestly as he is able, an instinct he doesn't otherwise understand in himself. The last painting stops him. Heavy strokes of a deep red-blue-black crimson laid in overlapping lines that, looked at right, resolve to waves; in the centre of the waves a ship. A red sea. A ship leaving. The dream from this morning, painted by a stranger he has never met. He pronounces it good and moves on, unsettled.

Llarimar does not lead him on to the petition hall as expected. There are no petitions today. The priests will instead be kneeling reverently in the courtyard because the new queen arrives today, and the God King will be married as soon as she arrives — no ceremony, no preparation, no delay. Lightsong notes again that he ought to pay more attention to politics. To arrange the welcome the priests need a Lifeless Command from one of the four gods who hold them; he is one. He gives them the noncombat phrase *Fledgling fruit*, which expires one day after first use, and privately thinks the system is needlessly elaborate but acknowledges that it is what makes him important on days like this. He lingers in the doorway then, idle, and asks Llarimar whether he had a wife before he died. The priest will not say. Lightsong describes aloud — inviting brown hair, dark tan skin, red lips three shades shy of the seventh harmonic — and a junior priest dives forward with the red tome to take it down. Lightsong falls silent, turns away, and walks out of the room. He does not return to his bedchamber. He has servants put a pavilion up on his patio. A new queen is going to arrive today, and he means to get a good look at her from above.