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Siri walks the coloured palace rooms beside Treledees, the God King's high priest, trying to talk him into letting her step outside even once. He is tall to begin with; the elaborate miter makes him taller; together they reduce her, room after green and blue and gold room, to a small girl losing every variation she proposes. An exception, he tells her with his leisurely accent, will not be possible. Not even into the court itself? Not even that. If she lacks for entertainment she has only to send for minstrels and jugglers. She is not locked up, she is observing a period of isolation. It is ancient, worthy, and shows respect for the God King. She makes the mistake of calling Hallandren the land of laxness and frivolity. He stops cold. They do not, he tells her, make exceptions in matters of religion, and he must assume she is testing him, because surely no one worthy of touching the God King could harbour such thoughts.

He bows out at her door and rushes away. She is left tapping her foot in front of a small army of silent servants. She sits, has them lay out an evening meal, and eats without tasting it. The interrupted nights — six of them now, kneeling naked on the bedchamber stone until she finally drifts off, the bed she does not dare touch reserved for after he has left in the morning, the sheets thrown into the hearth to fake a wedding night — have left her with a permanent ache in her back and neck. The days are empty. The servants will not talk to her. She does not even own the dresses she chooses each morning, because they vanish into the rolling wardrobes when she does not pick them. She has everything and nothing.

That evening, washed and perfumed and dressed in her chosen brilliant satin, she stands outside the bedchamber's golden door waiting for it to open. Bluefingers is at her shoulder as he is every night. The steward has, she has noticed, an almost supernatural sense of time in a palace that owns no clocks. Tonight he is nervous. He glances at her, at the door, then forces himself into small talk: things go well with the God King, then? She is tired so often; he assumes she is very active at night. She tells him yes, that is the point, everyone wants an heir. Then he meets her eyes properly and tells her, very quietly, that she should keep her wits about her, stay alert, watch herself. Her hair bleaches at once. He covers it back over with a forced smile, calls it nothing, ushers her through the door — and then, head against hers, whispers that not all in the palace is as it seems.

Inside, the fire crackles smaller than usual. The God King's Breath makes the room's colours too vivid; the lace at her sleeves bends the firelight into rainbows, and her gown burns gold with its own light. She drops the dress and the shift and kneels in her customary place. Bluefingers's words turn over and over in her head while her knees and back cramp. *Watch yourself.* Politics, surely. She wishes she had paid closer attention to her tutors. She wishes she were Vivenna, who would have figured this out already, who would have got the priests to listen and the God King to take her on the first night.

She is not Vivenna. She is just Siri, frustrated, cold, kneeling naked in someone else's idea of holiness, with no idea why any of it is going the way it is. So she sits up and snaps at the shadow in the corner. *Will you please just get on with it?*

The room is silent. Her hair goes bone white. She has just told the God King of Hallandren to come and rape her. She waits, eyes down, for the dress to come alive around her throat, for the rug to rise up smothering her, for the ceiling to fall in. Nothing happens. After a long minute she risks a glance upward. The God King has shifted in his chair and is sitting up straighter, watching her without expression. He does not look angry. He looks cold. Distant. She lifts her chin and meets his eyes, blushes furiously at being seen sitting upright and naked at last instead of bowed in the dark, and refuses to look away. He holds her gaze through the rest of the night. At the usual hour he stands, taps the door, and walks out, leaving her alive and bewildered. She crawls under the covers of the unused bed and falls asleep amazed. The God King's wrath, she thinks drowsily, is decidedly less wrathful than reported.