POV: lightsong
Summary
Weatherlove, god of storms, opens Truthcall's Tarachin balcony with a doubling sphere. Lightsong is on the bench beside Lifeblesser, sipping an alcohol-spiked juice, days into Llarimar's having finally coaxed him out of bed. The three other Returned could pass for one another in different colours: each seven feet tall, perfect-jawed, dressed up in his own house's hue. Lightsong has never bothered to learn Tarachin's rules — which is why he wins, by his own theory: the game rewards confidence and an instinct for the playing field, both of which he stumbles into by playing badly on purpose. He racks up a four-hundred-thirteen and a five-hundred-and-seven without paying attention to which sphere he picked.
The real game on the balcony is not the one with the spheres. Truthcall turns the table toward the new queen and the Idrians' broken treaty. He wants her pressured into giving up more access to the passes; Weatherlove agrees and lets it slip that his own plans are already in motion. Lifeblesser tactlessly votes to attack. They poll Lightsong on whether the queen is naive enough to manipulate; he deflects. He has met her once; she is exactly that naive, and exactly that ignorant, and these three blunt amateurs are not even the masters of the court — and they are already circling her. He thinks of the dreams of fire and the fall of T'Telir he has been having; he thinks of Blushweaver asking him to be part of her plans, perhaps because she needed a temperate counterweight. Doing nothing, he decides as he stands up to leave, is beginning to feel like more work than doing something. He excuses himself from the game and goes looking for Blushweaver.
Across the city, Vivenna watches a skeletal man named Fob slurp down expensive raw shellfish she is paying for. Denth and Tonk Fah flank her; Tonk Fah is building a tower out of empty mussel shells. Fob clears forests with government-loaned Lifeless and rents the cleared plots to growers — and the loan obliges him to surrender any wartime harvest to the Returned anyway, so Denth is pitching him on a pre-emptive sell-off. Fob resists until Vivenna lifts the gossamer shawl over her hair and changes it from red to blond and back. He sits back, mussel forgotten. They leave him eating, half-convinced.
Out on the street they rejoin Parlin, Jewels and Clod, and walk to the next appointment. On the way Vivenna asks about the Lifeless — how anyone controls it, why it answers to Jewels — and Denth explains the trick: a Lifeless can take a long list of new orders from anyone who knows its security phrase. Awakened objects can only be Commanded once; Lifeless are valuable because they retain enough of their humanity to obey ongoing orders. He won't give her the phrase without Jewels's permission. Tonk Fah returns from a street stall with a small monkey on his shoulder, having lost the parrot.
The second restaurant is filthy and dim, and Vivenna decides she will not be eating. Their contact, a beard-greasy, half-toothed man named Grable, arrives with two bodyguards and pulls up a separate table. He is, Tonk Fah whispers, the owner of the restaurant; every second man in the room is one of his. He is also a T'Telir thieving lord and a strong ally of Vahr's old rebellion, and the meeting has taken weeks to set up. Denth needs him to disappear merchant supply carts on their way into the city. Grable demands the Locks without a shawl this time. Vivenna cycles colours. Grable declares her a trained impostor and offers to buy her from Denth — *Word of her is spreading. You could move a lot of people with a girl who seemed to be of the royal family.* Denth stands. The bodyguards stand. There are two flashes. Vivenna does not see Denth draw; both bodyguards are on the floor with opened throats. Grable watches calmly, calls him as fast as the rumours say he is, and lets them walk out into the sun. He just wanted, Tonk Fah explains afterwards, to see Denth's blade — or to take her, whichever happened first.
Out on the street a leathery-faced Idrian in farmer's brown hurries up to her, ignores Denth's drawn sword, and falls to his knees. Thame — that is his name — has heard the rumours: she has come to take the throne back. Denth does not love it but agrees to question him somewhere else, and they walk into the slums to a dilapidated safehouse Denth keeps rented for occasions like this. Parlin insists on running the cancellation message to the next appointment alone, and Vivenna, trusting him, lets him go. The interrogation is short, and the trick of it is Tonk Fah — sleeves rolled up to show off muscle Vivenna has never seen him use, knuckles cracking — with Clod's waxy face filling the corner. Thame confesses he is a low-tier runner for a T'Telir boss named Rira, who sold the location of the meeting to several parties; Thame heard it for free. Vivenna cuts the threats and crouches by his stool: she promises him her help, and asks him to bring her the rest of the city's Idrians to meet. Denth sends Jewels out to tail him.
They wait the afternoon. Tonk Fah sulks at being denied his bad-guy moment and naps with the monkey on his stomach. Denth leans against the wall, eyes closed, while Vivenna paces around her own gnawing sense of being useless — she does not know subterfuge, Denth is running everything she pretends to be doing, and a cowardly piece of her wishes her father's agents would find her and end the choice. Denth tells her, in the same bored mercenary register he uses for everything, that running back to Idris would be the least useful thing she could do — there she has other heirs in front of her; here, at least, she is in the way of Hallandren. They talk briefly of Jewels: a Drab since childhood, her parents having sold her Breath to feed one of the Returned their weekly allotment. Vivenna turns, and Clod is silently standing at her stool again — as if curious about her. She makes them put him in the cellar. Jewels returns with three independent confirmations that Thame is who he said he is, and the group heads carefully home.