POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna sits at the fish restaurant with two mercenaries who have just announced they have been hired to kill her. Her hair bleaches white. She runs through the politics tutors' rules for hostage negotiation and remembers, with a small cold drop, that none of them cover the case where you are the hostage. Then Tonk Fah thumps the table laughing, his bird squawking on his back, and Denth apologises: mercenary humour. They kill sometimes, he explains; they don't murder. That's assassin work, and assassins get respect, which is unfair, because assassins are only mercenaries with a fancier name. They are, very respectably, here to collect her. Lemex sent them.
She challenges the claim. Denth hands her a folded paper as the keeper sets down a steaming pot of crab. The letter is in Lemex's hand and gives the proper authenticator — "for some measure now", with "measure" in place of "time" — under cover of an obviously decoy password. Lemex is sick, Denth says between cracking claws. Fevers. He has asked to be brought to her, or her to him. The mercenaries split her uneaten meal while she watches them eat. She decides to go.
Lemex is dying in an upstairs bed at his house. The nurse who quietly tells her so — nothing more can be done; he will not see another day — bows out at her dismissal, leaving Vivenna alone with her father's chief spy in Hallandren. Denth and Tonk Fah wait by the door with Parlin in his ridiculous floppy green hat. Lemex's face is the first she has ever seen, and it is wrong — too frail, too small a stick of a man for the spry, quick-tongued mentor of her tutorial letters. He is not the friend she had imagined. He is not the refuge she came to T'Telir to find. She leans over him and demands names and passcodes for the rest of her father's network, because she is a princess and this is what princesses do. He answers from inside the fever that he will not break under her torture. He thinks she is one of his interrogators.
Then a pulse of light washes over the bed and floor — not colour itself but a wave of enhanced colour, a ripple that briefly makes every hue in the room more itself. Denth, leaning in the doorway, names it casually: BioChromatic Breath. Old Lemex has a lot of it. A couple of hundred. Vivenna insists he is Idrian; he would never take Breath. The dying man chooses that moment to find her eyes, name her, and confess. He has been hoarding Breaths for years, inherited from his predecessor and added to with bought ones. He felt powerful with them; he could enter parties and the Court of Gods freely; they extended his life. He calls himself damned and begs someone to take the Breath away from him.
Denth makes the case for her, gently and without quite asking. The Breaths are worth enough to buy a spy network of her own. If Lemex dies still holding them they die with him. He himself will not keep them; he keeps a single Breath because too many Breaths make a man important and a target. Vivenna refuses. She will not traffic in the souls of men. She glances at Parlin and discards the thought of forcing them on him. She thinks about Siri alone in the God King's palace and almost wavers; she even tells Denth to take them, only to hear that the holder must consent and Command the transfer himself. She nearly orders Lemex to do it. Then she pulls back: a man who collects Breath from others is worse than a slaver. No. She has changed her mind. They will let the Breaths die with him.
Lemex looks up. His hand finds her arm. *My life to yours*, he says, in the clearest voice he has used all day. *My Breath become yours.* A vibrant cloud of iridescent air bursts from his mouth and rushes at her face. She closes her mouth. It does not matter. The Breath strikes her like a physical blow, drives her to her knees, leaves her shaking. She can feel everyone else in the room as a quiet presence in her bones. The colours of the floor and the wood and her own dress flare into vivid life. Parlin hurries over, calling her name, and the melody inside his voice is the first thing she truly hears. *God of Colors,* she thinks, steadying herself against the floor. *What have I done?*