POV: siri
Summary
Siri turns in her box at the arena and finds the God King standing behind her, with no door he could have come through. He wears white, as he often does, and now in open daylight she can see what his presence does to that white: the cloth fractures into a prismatic robe of light, the very air around him bending colour outward like a stained-glass aura. He is younger than she had imagined — barely older than her — and silent and unreadable as a carved face. He is, she realises with a kind of horror, unmistakably a god, and she has been treating him as a sulking husband. She drops, late, to her knees on the stone. He does not speak. A pair of Awakener priests command their coils of colourful rope and the rope hoists him up through the canopy to his golden throne on the outcrop above, where he sits without a glance at her.
Across the arena, in Blushweaver's box, Lightsong watches the same arrival and balks at kneeling at all. They can't execute a god, he points out. Blushweaver hisses him down anyway — *our cause*, she calls it, and he privately notes that one shared meeting has already enlisted him in her plans without his asking. He kneels because he sees no point in earning the God King's anger for the sake of a point. Both his divinity and Susebron's, he tells himself, are arbitrary props in the same game of make-believe. The thought is comfortable. He has long since decided that the imaginary is often the only solid thing people have.
Susebron gestures, the crowd rises, and the proceedings begin: priests of various colours mounting platforms on the sand to argue, at length, about how the city handles its refuse. Siri sits above it all, the white serving bowl beside her splitting into rainbows in the God King's aura, and turns the question of him over and over. He cannot really be a god. Can he? She has been raised on Austre, on the lost royal house, on Peacegiver and Kalad the Usurper and the heresies of Hallandren — and yet, that halo.
Bluefingers climbs to her box with his ledger, still scribbling. She tries to bring up his cryptic warning from the other night; he shuts her down with a single sharp look and a tight phrase about being properly displayed. They are studying her, he tells her, not the priests. She asks instead whether the Returned are really gods. He answers, with quiet reluctance, that he is not the man to ask. She presses: he works in the palace. So does she, he points out — and neither of them worships the Iridescent Tones. She is from Idris; he is from Pahn Kahl — a distinct people the Hallandren rule and which she had taken for the same thing. One can accept the God King as king, he says, without taking him for one's god. That is why he is a steward in the palace and not a priest.
She makes him explain the God King's halo. The other Returned do not bend white into colour the way he does, do they? They do not, Bluefingers agrees — because they do not hold what he holds. The Light of Peace, it is called: a hoard of Breath numbering somewhere in the tens of thousands. Peacegiver gathered it during the Manywar and gave it to the first Hallandren God King; it has descended father to son ever since, and each God King is given two new Breaths a week rather than the one each of the other Returned receive. The result, sustained over generations, is enough Breath for the only living holder of the Tenth Heightening: the level that fractures light around him, lets him break a stranger's Lifeless Commands, and lets him Awaken with the sound of his voice alone, without touch.
Siri sits back, oddly disappointed. Her husband is not a god, then; he is a man with rather a lot of BioChromatic Breath. And yet — the other Returned? Below her the Hallandren priests argue on, and her own theology of the royal house and Kalad the Usurper and Peacegiver suddenly looks suspect from the inside. The legend of Kalad's Phantoms — the Lifeless army said to wait somewhere out there to come down again — still gives her a shiver, even knowing it's a story told by hearthlight. Things in Hallandren are, she has to admit, less terrible than she was taught.
Vivenna, below on the open benches, is having the opposite revelation. The packed colour and bodies of the arena press in through her Third-Heightening perception until she can hardly breathe. She decides she has seen her sister and seen the court; that is enough; it is time to go. She stands and freezes. A man two rows behind her is staring straight at her. Ragged brown clothing, scruff that is not quite beard, rope for a belt, unkempt hair to his shoulders — and a bubble of intensified colour around him so bright her BioChromatic senses register him at roughly the Fifth Heightening. He shifts his cloak and the dark hilt of a long sword shows at his hip — a weapon almost no one wears in the city — and her perception flickers around it: tans into browns, reds into maroons, as though the blade itself drinks colour. She knows, without a word exchanged, that he knows exactly who she is. She tells Parlin they are leaving and rushes him into the stone exit passage. As soon as the doorway closes the awful sense of being watched falls away.
She is letting out her breath in the cool of the passage when Parlin, following stupidly with his bought umbrella, asks why she did not want to stay and hear what the priests were saying about Idris. She blinks at him. He frowns. He thinks, he says, that they might be declaring war. *Lord God of Colors*, Vivenna thinks — and turns and scrambles back up into the arena.