POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna sits on a kitchen stool in Lemex's yellow-and-green sitting room and announces her solution to the problem of the Breaths she now carries: she will give them away one at a time, to the Hallandren poor who have sold theirs and been reduced to Drabs. She has slept poorly. The body has been disposed of by Denth and Tonk Fah. The mercenaries did not leave in the night. Neither did her Breath problem.
Denth, leaning against the far wall, tells her gently that the plan does not work. Breath cannot be transferred one at a time; it must go all at once. Including her own Breath. Surrendering the hoard would leave her a Drab, and her stomach turns at the idea of losing not only the new perfect colour perception but her own soul along with it. Tonk Fah, on the couch with his parrot perched on his foot, suggests she stuff the Breaths into a pair of pants — Awaken something inanimate, leave the Breath there. The thought of Awakening makes Vivenna feel worse than holding does. She lets the question go for now. The harder one is what she does next in Hallandren without Lemex at all.
Denth sits down beside her and gives a small speech about being a mercenary. The job has terrible security, he tells her; employers die. Their current predicament — an employer dead, no orders — is exactly the kind of thing that makes the public assume mercenaries will turn around and rob the next of kin. He has, he can see in her face, just been read that way. He is not, he says, going to. He is an employee whose contract was with Lemex, and as far as he is concerned the contract transfers to her now if she wants it. The unspent half of the up-front payment alone owes her a few more weeks of work. She hesitates, finds reasons to trust him — they did not rob the place last night when they could have, and they did not take advantage of Lemex — and agrees.
She asks how big the band is. Three, Denth says: him, Tonk Fah, and Jewels, who is off "doing Jewels stuff" and handles the contracts. He cannot quote her the remaining term off the top of his head. They were paid as bodyguards but, he admits, are not without other skills. Lemex had them running errands, arranging meetings, leaning on people; they only ever saw pieces of what he was actually doing.
She tells them why she has come: to extract Siri from the God King's palace and get her back to Idris without Hallandren being able to trace the rescue and use it as a pretext for war. If she has to, she will swap herself in for her sister. Tonk Fah whistles. The mercenaries admit the mission is a touch outside their comfort zone, since it amounts to a kidnapping in reverse and they dislike kidnappings, but Denth agrees to think on it.
They then break the news about Lemex the man. He was, Denth tells her, embezzling. The hundreds of Breaths she now holds were not entirely "inherited from a predecessor"; the spy had been skimming her father's funds for years and quietly diverting them into Breath purchases, indicating to the king in his reports that his costs were higher than they truly were. He was, Denth insists, also a patriot — the projects Lemex had them on were genuinely for Idris — he just felt he had earned a little compensation for his patriotism. Vivenna sits with that for a while. She quotes the Five Visions to herself — *I saw men who placed themselves above others, and I saw them cast down* — and decides she should not judge a dead man. She agrees to let the mercenaries ransack the house for whatever Lemex was working on.
She insists on supervising. Denth disagrees: today is the Court Assembly, and that is also the day her sister is to be presented to the gods. If she wants a look at her, she had better leave. She points out, primly, that ordinary people cannot just walk into the Court of Gods. Denth smiles. If only she knew someone with enough BioChromatic Breath to count as important by sight. Fifty is the threshold, Tonk Fah adds, mock-impressed; that is a terribly high number. How many, Vivenna asks, does she have? Five hundred or so, Denth answers — enough for the Third Heightening and the soft halo of enhanced colour now coming off her wherever she walks. She had better hurry, he tells her. She is going to be late.
In the palace, Siri sits being braided and ribboned, blond with excitement, finally about to leave the building. She picks gold to clash with the priests' red, and instead of resigning herself to losing the other gold options, she asks if she can try all of them on. The servants are too polite to do anything but agree. She works through each gown in turn, giddy at the simple novelty of choosing.