POV: siri
Summary
Siri's carriage rolls to a stop outside T'Telir and she discovers that nothing in Idris has prepared her for what Hallandren thinks of as a welcome. A field of forty thousand soldiers in brilliant blue and gold stands at perfect attention along the highway, spear-points and blue tassels catching the wind. A double line of cavalrymen on enormous thick-hoofed horses, both man and mount draped in gold cloth, waits behind them. The city rises beyond — domes, spires, painted walls — too large for her to take in. Her own honour guard pulls in tight around the carriage. She can see the Bright Sea beyond the city, flat and luminous against the shore.
A man in deep blue robes with massive peaked shoulders and a matching headdress rides up to the carriage and announces himself as Treledees, high priest of Susebron the Grand, Returned God and King of Hallandren. The honour guard she has brought from Bevalis is, he tells her, a token escort; real protection is the field beside her. He turns his horse without waiting for an answer and leads them on. The jungle gives way to palms and sandy soil and then to the standing ranks of Hallandren troops on either side of the road. One of her guards is the first to whisper *Lifeless* — they have grey skin, grey hair, grey eyes, and stand too still for living men, but they are not the rotting skeletons of Idrian tales. They look like statues of men. She will marry a Returned, not a Lifeless — she has to remind herself of the distinction — and the only other Returned she remembers in her village died again a week after coming back.
Beyond the ranks the city wall rises in a great curve of plated gold, the gates shaped as two twisting sea creatures arching overhead. Inside, the T'Telir she has been expecting — the city of skulls and clashing obscene paint from her grandmother's stories — turns out to be wrong. T'Telir is loud and arrogant and overwhelming, but everything is the work of craftsmen: storefronts, statues, signage, even the simplest clothing of the bystanders crowding the road. Vibrant garishness rather than ugliness. Siri's Royal Locks go tentatively blond. It occurs to her that Vivenna would have hated this city, and that her father has known her sister twenty-two years; perhaps choosing Siri over Vivenna was not just expedience. The thought makes the weight of his trust worse, not better.
The road climbs through the south of the city. Past the gaps between buildings she sees the Bright Sea breaking into a bay; the wall of T'Telir is only a half-circle because the rest of the city's boundary is the water. They reach a smaller walled enclosure within the city, a plateau overlooking the sea. The common crowd is left at the gate. Past a blinding wall built to obstruct any view through the open entry, the carriage rounds into the Court of Gods — an enclosed lawn-covered courtyard with several dozen enormous mansions, each painted a single distinct colour, and crews of attendants kneeling prostrate in matching robes outside each. At the far end of the courtyard rises a much taller pyramidal black structure, dark in the city of colour: the God King's palace. Figures sit watching her from balconies overhead.
The carriage stops at the base of the black pyramid. Treledees rides his horse back up to the window: they have arrived, Vessel. As soon as they go inside she will be prepared and taken to her husband. Siri asks whether there will be a wedding ceremony. The God King, the priest tells her, does not require ceremonial justification — she became his wife the moment he desired it. She is blessed beyond all others, allowed even to touch him if he so wishes; and if she fails to please him she will be set aside in favour of another, which (he reminds her) might bode unfavourably for her rebel countrymen in the highlands. He turns his horse for the stone ramp leading up into the palace. The carriage lurches into motion behind him.