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Lightsong complains about the rain. He walks across the court grass to the arena with Llarimar beside him under a servants' canopy, the warm drizzle pattering down, and demands to know why a god cannot make the weather behave. Llarimar answers gravely that with twenty-five gods in the court there may simply be more who want the rain than want the sun, and that the rain is presumably what Lightsong's own deeper self wants anyway — for the crops, the drinking water, the city's trees and the grass he is enjoying. Lightsong mostly does this to annoy his priest; it works.

Inside the arena, gods are filling the upper ring of canopied stone boxes — Mercystar and Lifeblesser have already arrived. Lightsong bypasses his own empty box and walks around to Blushweaver's, which is topped with a green pavilion. She is lounging in her green-and-silver dress and rises with a slow smile as his servants set up his chair, footrest, and snack table beside her couch. He opens with the accusation that she is to blame for the weather; she lounges contentedly and does not deny it. They trade flirtation and grape-stealing while he tries to pry from her what she has invited him here to discuss. She refuses to say yet. Wait, she tells him. It is not drama; it is respect. She nods across the arena to the God King's box, sitting empty above its pedestaled golden throne, and then to the new queen's, just as empty. Her period of isolation, he realises with some surprise, is up; he has not been counting days. He counts off and slumps back to wait, accepting peeled nuts from a servant.

Siri, borne across the wet grass on her chair, has spent most of the journey trying to talk her serving women into letting the rain fall on her face for a moment — she has been cooped up for seven days and even the drizzle feels like deliverance — and then trying to talk them into letting her walk. The serving women's polite horror is enough to settle the question. Her gown is too daring to risk on the lawn anyway; she chose it for novelty, a sleeveless garment with a low neckline and a hem that ends halfway down her thighs in front and trails the floor behind. The porters carry her into the arena and up to her stone box, where her servants slot the canopy poles into pre-cut holes and her chair is lowered into place. She is free of the palace at last and immediately learns that her freedom consists of sitting above everyone else in the building, just as alone, with a flautist drowning out the chatter she would rather have been listening to. She watches the procession of arriving gods instead. Some walk; some are carried; one bare-chested god glances at her as he passes and earns a blush before he goes on. She counts the boxes. Fifty for twenty-five. The pantheon is half what its house was built for.

Vivenna walks into the court on her Breath alone. The priests at the gates wave her and Parlin through without a glance — the Heightening-given halo of enhanced colour around her is enough credential — and she finds herself studying them back, sorting how many Breaths each holds with the same precision she sorts the notes of a tune. Fifty for the priests. One each for the ordinary petitioners shuffling through with their papers. A couple of two-hundreds in the wealthier procession behind. Only one or two with more than her own roughly five hundred. She does not enjoy enjoying it. The colours are too lovely and the perfect-pitch perception of BioChroma too obviously a perversion of what she was taught.

The court itself is its own marvel. The ring of god-palaces sits on a single uninterrupted lawn, every building tuned in subtle shades to its theme colour, each red column a measured fifth from the wall it borders, the whole thing engineered for someone who has reached the Third Heightening and can hear it. She nearly kicks her shoes off and walks barefoot on the dewy grass. She doesn't.

Parlin, by her side with his bought umbrella, mostly tries to be helpful. He thinks the lawn would graze sheep well. She tells him it wouldn't. Goats, then? They cross toward the arena. Just before the entrance a tall god in blue and silver arrives, carried on no chair, walking under his own canopy with an entourage of thirty servants. His BioChromatic aura is a thirty-foot bubble; her First-Heightening sense reads his single Breath as infinite, immeasurable — and she understands for the first time that the Returned are not just upper-tier Awakeners but something categorically other, one Breath so powerful it carries them to the top of the Heightenings by itself. He sweeps through the gate reserved for gods while everyone else queues at the public one. Her awe shrivels into revulsion at his casual arrogance: this man absorbs another person's Breath every week to stay alive.

She is jolted out of the thought by a man beside her lifting suddenly several feet into the air, held aloft by his absurdly long cloak — the fabric stiffened into a kind of upright hand — so he can see the queue ahead. He drops back to the ground, mutters his Command, and his halo flushes brighter as the Breath returns from the cloth. The crowd advances. She and Parlin take a place on the stone benches above the sand floor, and she searches the canopied boxes above for her sister. She finds her. Siri is in a scandalous golden dress that does not reach her knees, her hair the bright yellow of enjoyment with red ribbons woven through it. *My sister,* Vivenna thinks, with a chill. *My poor sister.* What they have done to her. The squarejawed Parlin beside her goes hard with quiet anger. She agrees. Then Parlin frowns and asks why everyone has started to bow.

In her box, Siri notices the same thing. The last god has taken his seat, twenty-five exactly, that should be all of them — and the audience and the gods together are dropping to their knees. Her dress flares with augmented colour; a white serving bowl on her table splits into a rainbow; the stone at her feet shines. A serving woman tugs her sleeve from below and whispers, behind you.