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Lightsong finds Blushweaver in her garden, where a master gardener is composing a living kaleidoscope of potted blossoms around her — the gods are too godly to leave the court and visit the city gardens, so the gardens are brought to them. He hands her a sheet in artisans' script: a pre-written transcript of the conversation he expects they are about to have, including her opening innuendo (which he has labelled *mildly suggestive* and which she objects to as having been blatant), his clever deflection, and the part where he apologises for being so distant and finally says yes. She reads it through, sighs, and accepts. He clarifies the terms: he does not believe the new queen is plotting anything; he is joining Blushweaver in order to keep her from crushing the girl with the rest of them.

Blushweaver has work for him. Mercystar was attacked in her own home the night before, and they are going to recruit her. They cross to her palace, where Mercystar is reclining on a couch under palm-leaf fans, theatrically out of sorts. Blushweaver consoles her, hints that the intruder must have been an Idrian — disrespectful of court tradition, and suspiciously well-timed to the war scare — and asks her to join their precautions. Lightsong interrupts. Outside, he asks what she is doing; *recruiting*, she says, *we're going to need her Lifeless Commands*. She lays out her reasoning: only four of the Returned hold those Commands, Mercystar is one, and if you were preparing for war with Hallandren the first thing you would do is try to take those Commands — by finding them, recording them, or killing the gods who hold them. They go back, and Mercystar agrees to join. Blushweaver departs satisfied, having extracted what she came for; she is annoyed when Lightsong does not come with her.

Because Lightsong has, in passing, learned that one of Mercystar's servants was killed in the break-in — and is, against every habit of his life, refusing to let it go. He returns to the pavilion. He asks how the man died. Mercystar doesn't know the details; she sends him to her priests. He pulls Llarimar alone out of his entourage — *Scoot, you coming?* — and walks into the palace.

A cluster of priests in the servants' corridor receive him uneasily — they cannot refuse a god questions — and walk him to the spot of the killing, where workers are tearing up the bloodstained boards. They lay out the sequence: two guards at the door knocked unconscious; four servants encountered the intruder in the back hallway; he immobilised one with an Awakened rope; two fled; he knocked the fourth unconscious; help, delayed by a Lifeless animal causing chaos, eventually arrived to find the tied servant stabbed through the heart with a dueling blade. The intruder fled empty-handed. They suggest he was a common burglar trying to reach the gallery. They mention, when asked, that the Lifeless beast had been built with modern Command words and even ichor-alcohol for blood. Lightsong nods along, kneels to inspect a patch of floor a short distance from the killing site that has been drained completely of colour, and walks back out into the sun knowing two new things.

First, he can tell when a priest is lying to him. He cannot say how he knows — it is just a certainty arriving without warning, from some instinct he had not realised he had. Mercystar's priests are lying about the break-in. The conclusion does not unsettle him; it excites him in a way that feels disquietingly familiar. Second: the intruder was no Idrian. Llarimar notes that Idrians occasionally do buy Breath in T'Telir, and Lightsong grants it — but no Idrian would ever Awaken a Lifeless squirrel, which they consider an abomination, and a thief who could afford to burn a permanent Breath on a diversion and could afford to drain the colour out of his own clothes on the way out was no common burglar either. Whoever broke in was rich in Breath and skilled, and he was after something in the back hallway where there is nothing of value — not the gallery up front.

Llarimar looks at him strangely the whole walk back. *That's some very solid reasoning,* he says. *I know,* Lightsong replies. *I feel positively unlike myself.* He keeps turning the question over through the rest of the afternoon, through a nice meal, and into the night. He is supposed to be a god for all people, not just important ones. He has never wondered about anything before. Today he cannot stop.