POV: siri
Summary
The gold door closes behind Siri on the God King's bedchamber. The chamber is black — walls, floor, sheets, all of it — lit only by a hearth that throws shifting orange shadows out of the corners. The bed, massive, is empty; against the far wall a thronelike chair holds a figure all in black, watching her, eyes unblinking in the firelight. She gasps and looks down, remembering everything Bluefingers told her, and works the laces of her gown with shaking fingers. The white undershift throws a spectrum of bent colour against the room — her own Breath, visible at last to her in the Returned god's aura. She pulls it off, kneels naked on the cold stone, and bows her forehead to the floor.
Nothing happens. The fire crackles and the room slowly darkens as the logs burn down. No knock comes against the bedpost. Her back begins to ache. She tries not to imagine the shape of him, only a foot taller than other men and broader through the shoulder, eyes cold on her. Was he displeased — was she insufficiently pretty — has he noticed she is not the elder sister he was promised? She decides he is toying with her, watching how long she will hold the pose. She holds it. Hours pass. Vivenna had the training and the poise, she thinks; what she has is stubbornness, and her father gave up forcing her to lessons years ago because of it. She kneels through the rest of the night, naked in the dying coals, and waits.
Outside, in the Court of Gods, the same night is an extravagance. Lightsong reclines on a couch on the lawn, attended by servants with parasols and drinks and steaming towels, while firemasters set off fountain after fountain of sparks at his direction. Other gods are arrayed in front of their own palaces around the ring; performers cluster along the edges hoping for a Returned's notice. Susebron himself is not in attendance; the festivities are beneath him, and Lightsong cannot keep his eyes from drifting to the black palace that looms over the court.
Llarimar wanders into his torchlight in priestly robes — still working, when he should be out in T'Telir with his family — and frets pointlessly over his god's comfort until Lightsong sends him home. A more interesting visitor follows. Blushweaver the Beautiful, goddess of honesty, glides up with thirty servants, her own couch, six lesser priests and her high priestess, and arranges herself on the grass next to him in a green-and-silver gown split to the hip and laced so low it gives away the punch line. She has, as always, objectives.
They spar verbally about her beauty and his refusal to greet her properly; she invites him, when the fireworks tire her, to come back to her palace for *other entertainments*. He hesitates. The woman of his recurring vision — the brown-haired stranger he described to Llarimar that morning — flashes behind his eyes. He declines. She presses; he declines again on the grounds that he is too lazy. She lets the flirtation go, rolls onto her side, and lets Lightsong see the other reason she came: the new queen.
Hallandren has not had a queen of the royal line in the court since the days of Kalad the Usurper, she tells him. The marriage implies the Court of Gods still acknowledges royal authority. What happens if Dedelin decides to take his lands back? What happens if the new queen has a child by someone other than the God King — who is the heir then? Lightsong objects that only the God King can engender children, and they are always stillborn; she answers that the only word for that comes from the palace priests themselves, and she has heard there are discrepancies in the records. Three centuries of rule by the Court of Gods ought, in her view, to be legitimacy enough without an Idrian bride.
Some of them are planning, she says — quietly, watching him — and she does not intend to be caught surprised the way the old royals were when Kalad seized the throne, or the way Kalad was when Peacegiver took it from him. He could join them, she says. He is, after all, the god of bravery. He brushes the recruitment off the same way he brushed off the seduction: politics, my dear. She rises, stretches, kisses him softly, and tells him he is a better man than he gives himself credit for — she would not, she says, offer herself to just anyone. There must be at least three other gods in the court she would refuse, in fact. She glides away with her servants. Lightsong dismisses the firemasters with praise and lets the minstrels play. He cannot stop hearing Blushweaver's warning, and cannot stop seeing the burning ship.