POV: vasher
Summary
From a wall of the Court of Gods, Vasher watches the new queen's carriage creep up the ramp into the black palace and swears under his breath. He had not believed the Idrians would actually send royal blood — a pawn of that value, dropped in Hallandren's lap — and the girl will, he thinks, become a problem he has to deal with before he is done. Nightblood does not see the difficulty; the sword still talks to him like an impatient child, even sheathed.
Vasher wraps his foot in a banner-tapestry that hangs down the outer wall and Awakens it with a Command to lower him. Hundreds of Breaths pour out of him into the cloth; he carries enough now to spare on such extravagances. The fabric twists alive, forms a hand around him, even feigns muscle and vein, and sets him on the street. He Commands the Breath back out of it and the tapestry slumps. A few passersby pause to watch, only mildly interested: T'Telir is full of Awakeners with a thousand Breaths and is no place to be impressed by one more. He does not pass entirely unnoticed, though. He brightens colours around him just by walking, obvious to anyone with the First Heightening and visible even to ordinary people, and his days of skulking are over.
He carries Nightblood down through the streets to a restaurant near the Court of Gods — one of the few T'Telir luxuries he has missed in his years away — and takes the reserved booth, leaving the sword propped against the wall. The sword is stolen within a minute. He ignores it. The waiter brings him citrus tea. Bebid, a priest of Brightvison the True, slides in opposite him wearing street clothes still unconsciously coloured in his deity's white and green, sweating visibly; Vasher's life-sense reads him as plateaued at the First Heightening, which is where most who can afford the cost stop. Vasher has bought the surrounding booths empty with the cost of the meal.
Bebid stalls; Vasher reminds him, with strained civility, of the indiscretions he is leaning on, and bends a spoon with his finger when his patience slips. The priest yields. There is, he says, a faction inside the Court of Gods pushing to take the war up into Idris — quiet enough that even attentive priests catch only hints — and he cannot fathom why. Vasher tells him not to be an idiot. Crushing Idris is a sound move for the Hallandren crown for one reason: the so-called highland rebels are the actual surviving royal line of pre-Manywar Hallandren, and any sensible monarch executes anyone with a better claim than his own. Bebid agrees that the politics are real but warns that the fight will not be a quick squashing the way Vahr's rebellion was — Idris has allies across the mountains and the sympathy of a dozen kingdoms; what court orators are calling a "simple quelling" could easily become a second Manywar in which Hallandren's dye trade collapses and thousands die. Kalad's Phantoms, man, he says. Vasher continues to eat.
Vasher asks instead about the rebels in the city. Bebid waves them off as broken now that Vahr is dead, and notes that no one knows who killed him; everyone assumes his own people did. Vasher does not enlighten him. He asks who he should talk to about the war faction; Bebid suggests one of Mercystar's priests, or, more usefully, a man called Bluefingers — not a god, but the High Place steward, head of the scribes, and the man who actually keeps the court running. Stiff, he warns, hard to break. Vasher tells him he broke Bebid, didn't he, and gets up to leave Bebid to settle the bill. In an alley behind the restaurant he finds Nightblood sheathed but for a fraction of an inch, jutting from the chest of the thief who took him; a second cutpurse lies dead nearby. The sword chides Vasher for losing his temper inside, points out — with the air of someone who has noticed it before — that he never really stopped losing his temper, and suggests more corpses next time. They walk out of the alley together.
On the other side of the Court of Gods, Lightsong watches the carriage from his patio, two cups of wine in to settling his nerves after the morning's Drab child. A new queen, he tells Llarimar, has at least the virtue of cancelling his petitions for the day. The priest stands stiffly over his chair, troubled: the court has not had a queen in some thirty years, and the factions will not handle her gracefully. The sea breeze brings back Lightsong's morning dream in sharper colour — a T'Telir aflame, the bay bloodied with its reflection, a burning ship and soldiers running in the streets — and he flinches under it before he can talk it away. The priests, he knows, will treat the nightmare as prophecy whether or not it deserves the name.
He chases Llarimar into one of the patio couches and they argue lazily about war: Lightsong points out that Idris holds the best mineral deposits in the region, four vital northern passes, and the original Hallandren royal line, and that Dedelin's people do not consider themselves rebels waiting to come home. The talk of Idrian dissidents stirring trouble inside the city, he dismisses, is only rumour. He sees in Llarimar's silence that the priest is unconvinced. Lightsong calls for more wine and admits he cannot get drunk on it, his Returned body being immune to toxins; he is, he tells Llarimar, quite good at pretending.