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Vivenna walks back to Lemex's house through a wealthy residential stretch of T'Telir, turning the court debate over and over in her head. Her tutors told her the Court Assembly's arguments often go nowhere; this one did not feel like one of those. It felt the way her father has always said the war was going to feel — inevitable. She is beginning to admit something she had not allowed before: that her training and her tutorials prepared her badly. One day in T'Telir and she knows less than she thought she did. Had she been the daughter sent, she would have been as helpless as she now suspects Siri is. Parlin walks beside her, pausing to study ferns and palm trees, oblivious as ever. They pass under one of the city's silent stone D'Denir, dramatic as if he were going gloriously to war.

They reach the house and stop. The front door is hanging from one hinge and split through, as though someone has kicked it in. Parlin has his hunting knife half-out before Denth appears at the broken doorway and waves them in. Inside, Vivenna finds the wreckage: stuffing strewn from cushions, walls broken, pictures slashed, chair legs splintered, half the staircase in pieces. The mercenaries did, after all, say they were going to search the house thoroughly. Tonk Fah lounges on a broken couch as proof.

Upstairs at Lemex's desk — its false-bottom drawer emptied onto the splintered top — she sorts what Denth and Tonk Fah have pulled out of the walls: papers, several bags. One bag clinks. She opens it: gold marks, a little over five thousand by Denth's count, scattered hoardings the mercenaries assembled from chair legs and skirting boards. They could simply have walked off with it. They didn't. Denth tells her, half-joking, that this is the look he most resents — the assumption that a mercenary's first impulse is theft — and he leaves her to read.

She reads for hours, by candle, alone. The letters are mostly in her father's own hand — never his scribe's, which means they are the ones King Dedelin held the most personal or most secret. The last, only a few weeks old, is the one she rereads. War is coming, her father writes. He has spoken with Yarda; they can see no solution. He gives Lemex leave to do as they have discussed — any disruption, any delay he can buy. He confesses that the money he sent to Lemex to buy Breath enough to enter the Court of Gods was, in his judgment, the best he ever spent. And, almost in a private aside, he says that he cannot do it: he cannot send Vivenna to a city he believes will kill her. He may break the treaty rather than send her. He admits this is the wrong call for the kingdom and his alone to make.

Vivenna sits in the silent room and does not move for a long time. She holds her Royal Locks still by will. The father in this letter is not the man she has been taught: he is the king who tried to keep one daughter by sacrificing the other and lied to her face about why. The king who broke the highest tenet of his own religion to buy a spy enough Breath. The truth she keeps coming back to, past the anger and the tear she resents, is that he was right about what Hallandren meant to do. Without intervention they will march on her homeland, take Siri hostage against her father's surrender, and execute her when he refuses. *And that is what I am here to stop.*

She comes down the splintered stairs to find Denth, Tonk Fah, and Parlin teaching one another a card game. She kneels on the floor, makes herself small, and tells them: Lemex's money came largely from her father; Lemex was personally greedy but politically loyal; his orders were to sabotage Hallandren's ability to wage war. She intends to continue that work. Getting her sister out comes first; weakening the war machine comes next. The mercenaries do not look surprised. Denth stands. *Better get back to work, then,* he says, as though it had never been in question.

He starts handing her threads to pull. He can reach what remains of Vahr's faction — the cell Lemex was quietly funding — and recover other half-finished operations of Lemex's. Then he tells her they will be moving out tomorrow. Lemex's house is too well known to his old contacts to keep; the burgled remnants will be tidied up by city watchmen in a day or two; the funeral arrangements have been quietly let lapse. Tonk Fah adds that he has a problem with mattresses, and chairs, and tables, and walls, and people. They will, Denth promises with deliberate ambiguity, try not to break the next house quite so badly.