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Lightsong hears petitions. The Wedding Jubilation is not even over, and already the people of T'Telir are queued out across the lawn of his palace to beg him to die for them. He has been at it for over an hour. He sends Llarimar to invite the waiting line to sit on the grass instead of standing in respect — there is no point keeping them on their feet — and slumps back in his throne, half-attentive, hating the part of himself that calculates how many years of this he has left to endure.

A young woman is led in with a swaddled child. The BioChromatic aura of his godhood washes the blanket sharp blue as she approaches, and within that aura Lightsong can read the truth of the infant's body the way another man might read a chart: it is wasted, fever-eaten, an hour or two from dead. The mother kneels and begs him by his title to take her Breath, her family's Breaths, her hundred years of service, anything, if he will only spend himself to save her son. He closes his eyes and tells her, twice, that he cannot. She thanks him quietly and is led weeping away.

He bolts. He slams through the back door of the petition hall and stands shaking with his head in his hand and his colours flaring around him in answer to the surge of emotion. When the servants come worriedly after him he chases them out. Llarimar finds him there. They argue, briefly, about what it is the petitioners actually want. Lightsong argues that no one really expects the Lord of Bravery to do it; it is just that being asked, day after day, knowing you could, is enough to drive a man to suicide by miracle. Llarimar answers in priestly platitudes about hope. Lightsong orders the rest of the line sent home and tells Scoot to tell them to come back tomorrow if they are foolish enough.

He climbs up to the second-story patio of his palace, alone with the salt wind, and looks out over T'Telir toward the sea. He has been dreaming again of war. Not war out in the highlands, but his own city burning. Everyone says that if war comes, Hallandren will win it easily. He cannot make the dream stop telling him otherwise. Blushweaver's words from earlier in the week still circle him — that he is a god to these people, that he will have to stand for something eventually, that he is better than he gives himself credit for being. He resents how the more obviously useless he tries to be, the more determined his admirers become that he must be deep inside an unrecognised hero.

Llarimar joins him at the railing. The line is gone, he reports. Lightsong turns the conversation, with effort, to actual theology: what is the point, religiously, of gods who can only heal once and then die? Llarimar explains, quietly. Returned are men and women who died, but who chose to come back instead of staying past the Iridescent Wave. They are kept alive by the Breath the people give them so that they have time to bless. But they are not meant to stay forever; the crossing has fragmented their memory of what they came for, and the petitions are part of how they are supposed to recover it. Lightsong's purpose may be a single life, or a vision he saw on the other side of the Wave, or some event he was sent back to be part of. The heroic way he died gave him the chance to come; the visions in his dreams may be what he came to deliver. When he has done it, he will know who to give his Breath to and continue on. Lightsong asks, dryly, what if he doesn't believe any of it. Then maybe, Llarimar says, that is what he came back to discover. The next sentence breaks down so completely under his own logic that even his priest laughs.

Lightsong looks across at the black palace of the God King and asks what to make of the new queen. Not her, the implications. The court of twenty years ago, the one that thought folding the royal line back into Hallandren would be a good idea, is gone. The gods who knew how to handle the moment of her arrival are dead — Calmseer and Brighthue among them, the rare Returned who actually granted petitions — and have left lesser replacements like himself. He tells Llarimar to ask Blushweaver for a shared box at the next day's Court Assembly. Perhaps she will distract him. He watches the rejected petitioners trail out the gate toward home and thinks, despite the doctrine that says he can't get a headache, that politics is giving him one.

Across the court, in the black palace, Siri stands at the bedroom window in her shift and looks out over the sea. She should be dead. She spoke to the God King directly last night, sat up and made a demand of him, and waited all morning for the punishment. None came. The part of her still aghast at her own boldness is getting quieter. She has been letting her fears push her around, she decides. That is not how she usually moves through the world. She lets her hair go from anxious brown to determined gold, leaning on the windowsill with the sea breeze on her face. It is time to stop being afraid.