POV: siri
Summary
Siri arrives at the God King's door for the first time in weeks neither tired nor afraid. The week-long arrangement — climb into the bed once the women release her, fall asleep there in comfort, leave her husband alone in his corner — has settled into a routine the priests apparently accept. She is no longer naked in front of anyone, and she has even begun to attend Court Assembly sessions on her own, picking up the social geometry of the palace.
Bluefingers is not writing on his ledger. He is fidgeting. When she catches his eye he confirms in a hissed half-confession that yes, word has gotten out around the palace that the God King is now responding to his queen — and then he tells her this is precisely the problem. *Doing your duty as the Vessel was the danger.* She must not bear him a child. That, not the consummation itself, is what threatens her and threatens him both. He will not say more. He tells her to read her histories, says a stray word from her would mean his death, and scuttles away. Siri goes into the bedchamber, performs her counterfeit consummation for the listening priests, then lies back in the dark to puzzle at it. *Read your histories.* If the secret were that easy to find, why would it be dangerous to speak?
She has begun to think of Bluefingers almost as a friend — a fellow foreigner in a city that swallows foreigners — when she feels something close in the dark and opens her eyes. The God King is leaning over her. She screams; he flinches away; she clutches the bedspread for cover she has long since lost the right to. He stands by the bed in his black clothes — odd, she thinks, when his BioChromatic halo could make white blaze on him — and looks more uncertain than a god ever should. He sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches into his shirt.
Convinced for one wretched moment that *now* is the night, she braces — and what he pulls out is a book. A book of children's stories, by the title on the spine. He opens it carefully, the paper bending oddly under his halo, and points to the first word. She tells him what it says. He turns the book around, studies it himself, then turns it back and points again. She asks him, in the end, why he doesn't simply tell her. He opens his mouth.
The God King of Hallandren has no tongue. The scar is just barely visible in the hearth's wavering light. Her mind goes straight to her childhood lessons: Awakening requires a clear, crisply spoken Command — any slur or stutter and the Breath does nothing. The man who could Awaken almost anything within earshot has been silenced, deliberately, almost certainly as a child. He looks away, ashamed, and moves to leave.
She stops him with a hand on his arm and apologises for the look on her face — it was not for his mouth, but for what they had done to it. He sits back down. He opens the book again, looks her in the eyes, and pleads silently. *You can't read, can you?* He shakes his head. And Siri sees the rest of it at once: not a god, a puppet. Mute by design. Unlettered by design. Paraded by his priests because his prismatic halo turns crowds to their knees, and kept from ever telling anyone the truth of it. No wonder Bluefingers is so afraid. *If they would do that to their own god, then the rest of us are nothing to them.* It makes plain sense, now, why the priests forbid kissing or speaking; why they dislike her for spending nights with him; why the threat she poses is that of a witness.
She tells him she is sorry. Then he points at the page again, and she gives him the first letter — *that is shash* — and offers, smiling, to teach him all of them. *The priests were right to be worried.*