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Siri sweeps into the palace scribes' wing in a blue and white gown with a ten-foot train, serving women carrying the end of it, and finds a long bare-walled hall lined with tables and clerks — Pahn Kahl in their brown, Hallandren in the day's colours. The whole foreigner's wing of the palace is in the black stone half; only the centre rooms, where she and her husband live, are colour. The scribes look up in shock as she passes. She means to take the histories Bluefingers told her to read, and find out for herself what danger her marriage has put her in.

Through the doors at the far end she finds a roomful of mid-rank priests in the day's violet and silver, and announces she wants books. They offer to send a reader to the city collection for something more appropriate — a book of stories. She is just about to insist when Treledees appears behind her: fingers laced, miter on his head, frown in place. He will not let her have the books. They are valuable; even his own priests cannot remove them; the God King himself, he says, wishes the volumes to stay in the room. She may sit and read here under the eyes of his priesthood if she likes. She does not.

Back in the bedchamber, she flops onto the bed in her evening dress, and the God King — who has pulled his chair up beside her, board on his knee, charcoal in hand — writes that he told her so. They communicate by his board now. She has hidden a cup in the room for listening at the wall. After her counterfeit consummation each night there is a scrape of chairs and the closing of a door; whether the priests truly leave or only pretend to is unclear, so she whispers anyway. He defends the priests as good men working hard for his kingdom. She points out that they cut out his tongue. He pauses, then writes — slowly, awfully — *It was necessary. I have too much power.*

She pries gently. They are not as innocent as he thinks; if they were, why does he hide the reading lessons from them? He looks at the floor. *I do not want them to know,* he writes; *I do not want to upset them.* She tries sarcasm and has to spell the word for him. He erases it and writes back that it makes no sense to him; why not just say what you mean? It dawns on her that he has never met mockery, that he has lived his whole life as a revered deity addressed only in absolute reverence, and that what she has been reading as arrogance or vacancy in his face is something else — earnestness, an open and unstudied attempt to understand. *You are very normal,* he writes solemnly. *Because in reality, you are quite strange.* She finds, to her own surprise, that she has started to like him.

He picks up his book of children's stories. He brings it everywhere; from how he handles it she can see it is the only real possession he has. His mother read these stories to him as a child, before she was taken away, and he memorised every one. The morality he was raised on came almost entirely from them: obey, treat people well, don't lie, don't go into the jungle alone, children who disobey are eaten by monsters (his mother taught him the monsters were not real, but the lessons stuck). The rest of what he knows came from priests trained to make him a figurehead. He had memorised the letters in his book years before her arrival; she had only needed to teach him the rules of spelling and sound.

She begins to fish at the perimeter of his sheltering. Why, she asks delicately, has he simply sat on the edge of the bed each night without coming for her? *From taking you?* he writes. *I do not understand.* She rephrases. He writes back that he sat there because he did not know what else to do — *I knew that we need to have a child. So I sat and waited for it to happen. We must be doing something wrong, for no child has come.* She stares. None of his priests, in his entire life, have ever explained to him how children are made. No prior consorts. No mistresses. No concubines. The priesthood has gone to careful lengths to be sure he never accidentally fathers an heir.

She turns the next question on him: why, then, *now*? He has lived two decades looking barely twenty, Returned do not age, Returned do not catch disease — what threat to him has prompted them, after fifty years of rule, to bring him a wife of the right bloodline at all? He writes that without an heir, if he were killed, no one would rule. They were not afraid of his being killed before? He pauses, frowning, slowly erases his board. *They must think you're in danger now,* she says, *but not from sickness.* She asks how the previous God Kings died. There have been only four, he writes, and he does not know for certain. He was told as a child that his father gave his life for the kingdom — that, like other Returned, he released his BioChromatic Breath to heal the sick; that an ordinary Returned can only cure one person, but a God King can cure many.

She lies back. *Only four kings in several hundred years, all dead of mysterious circumstances.* Bluefingers said the danger was the child; that it would only threaten her once there was an heir; that it would threaten the God King too. There is one set of people in the palace who would benefit from a young, manipulable infant on the throne in her husband's place. She looks across at him, reverently spelling out his book to himself in the firelight, and is almost as afraid of the lack of a child as she is of having one.