POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna — firstborn daughter of Dedelin, for twenty-two years prepared for the role her sister has been handed — stands at the edge of a T'Telir street and decides aloud that it is the ugliest place she has ever seen. People stream past her, draped in riotous colour, shouting and stinking and bumping. A herdsman drives a small flock of dyed-different-colours sheep toward the market square; the clash hurts her eyes. She has bleached her hair grey under a shawl in a half-passable imitation of an old woman, but the city is so vast and so disordered that even a princess from the highlands needs no disguise to disappear. She has just arrived. She has come, on her own initiative and against her father's plan, to rescue her sister.
She has slipped out of Idris under cover of a fictitious "expedition to gather highland roots", supplies explained away as emergency kits, Parlin and a few of his woodsman friends as guard. She has sent the friends back as soon as she reached the city; only Parlin remains. She has left her father a letter, due to be delivered to him that evening, explaining herself and warning him: if she sees Idrian soldiers searching for her she will walk into the Court of Gods and offer to trade herself for Siri. She does not want to do that. The God King might keep both.
She waits in the shadow of a stone warrior — one of the famous D'Denir Celabrin statues that stand all across the city, posed and armed and dressed by passers-by as a Hallandren pastime. Lore says Peacegiver the Blessed commissioned the first of them at the close of the Manywar; each Returned has paid for new ones every year since, with money that ultimately comes out of the city's pockets. Parlin returns from scouting in an absurd floppy green hat which she makes him put away. He has noticed something she did not expect: there are a great many Idrians working in this market — some trading, most as common labourers. With other Idrians visibly around her, Vivenna hides the change of her hair under her shawl and lets the grey go back to brown.
They push through the crowd to the restaurant where she has arranged to meet Lemex, her father's chief spy in the city, an old correspondent of hers from her tutorials. She has written him to check the place at noon each day until she arrives. T'Telir's inland-sea wealth presses in on either side as she walks: dyed silks (made, she remembers, from the Tears of Edgli that grow only on this coast), exotic foodstuffs, brown-skinned Tedradel traders with their long beards bound up into stiff cylinders. The market is an orgy of colour and motion. Even Parlin, who has been here once before, stares.
Pressed in on all sides by smell and colour, Vivenna's training nearly breaks. By the time they push through the fish restaurant's doorway she is on the edge of panic and her hair has powdered halfway to white. Parlin points it out gently. She fixes it; sits at the table the keeper leads them to; uses the false name Lemex knows to expect; orders nothing while Parlin chooses a seafood stew. The wait will be long — Lemex may not arrive at all today, and she has come into the city on bare minimum cover. Parlin cannot stay still inside; he wants to learn the place on its perimeter. She lets him go, reluctantly, and sits alone.
A man sits down opposite her. He is too young to be Lemex — long-faced, styled, dressed in brown leather under a token red vest — and he is, evidently, here for her. He launches into a monologue about how unfair it is that everyone else trades labour for money and respect but mercenaries do not. He shakes her hand, names himself Denth, and gestures across to a much larger man sitting down on her other side: Tonk Fah, cudgel strapped across his back, a brightly coloured bird perched on it. Tonk Fah takes her hand once Denth is done with it and announces himself pleased. Denth apologises: unfortunately, princess, they are there to kill her.