POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna walks the perimeter of a garden square in central T'Telir, hair turned a forced yellow, dressed in a tube-cut Tedradel gown — the only modest cut Parlin and Tonk Fah could find in a city where local women wear short sleeveless skirts. A month in Hallandren has begun to teach her how to move with the crowd; she still does not want to be out in the open, but Denth has talked her into coming on the grounds that a bodyguard who is not present cannot guard. Her hair, kept rigidly under her royal locks discipline, gives nothing away.
The square is a quartered green of palms and ferns and beds of flowers — some of which, she realises with the buzzing inner sense of so much Breath, are real Tears of Edgli planted by the city for everyone to enjoy rather than picked and brought inside. D'Denir statues stand along the walks with arms upraised. Tonk Fah and Parlin lounge against a shopfront with the monkey on Parlin's shoulder; Jewels trails her invisibly through the crowd; Clod waits among the statues, indistinguishable from them; Denth is somewhere she cannot find. Lifeless of every shape pass by carrying parcels for shopkeepers — common enough in T'Telir that no one looks twice at Clod.
The diversion goes off in sequence. A building beside Tonk Fah catches fire; passers-by run to help, traffic halts, and Clod steps forward and clubs the leg of a carriage horse. The carriage tips, a trunk falls, and — better than planned — the trunk splits open and scatters gold across the slate. The vehicle belongs to Nanrovah, high priest of Stillmark; the contents had been confirmed valuable by Denth's intelligence. While Hallandren runs toward fire and money, Denth and a gang of thieves crack a spice merchant's stores. Jewels nods her out and Vivenna walks calmly away with Jewels and Parlin beside her, surprised at how hard her heart is pounding for someone who has done nothing more dangerous than stroll in a park.
Hours pass at the new safe house, the awful green furniture too bright for Idrian eyes, Denth and Tonk Fah still not back. Jewels watches the street and asks Vivenna in plain words to stop talking to her. Trying to honour the Fifth Vision — understand the other before judging her — Vivenna crosses the room and lays a hand on her shoulder, gentle, and tells her she is sorry for what was done to her Breath. Jewels starts laughing. She does not need to be pitied. She gave the Breath of her own will at eleven years old — her father had broken his back in the dye trade, she had five younger siblings, the family's earlier sale of their own Breath had bought the business they could no longer work — and the price for hers fed them a year. Her Breath was given to the God King directly, and a part of her now lives on inside him; that is, she insists, a greater honour than Vivenna can begin to understand.
Vivenna tries to argue that the Iridescent Tones are no real gods to give a Breath to, and Jewels — invoking Kalad's Phantoms — slams the comparison back in her face. Idris sends its own children away to become monks for life, and that is called faith; when a Hallandren family gives a Breath to the same end, it is called exploitation. She is a daughter of T'Telir, Tonk Fah is Pahn Kahl, Denth is from no place she can name — and she is the believer of the group. She will not be pitied; she will not be condescended to; she will not be argued with. Vivenna has no answer. She climbs the stairs.
On the balcony at dusk the city's pole lamps are being lit one by one, an extravagance the Idrian highlands could never afford. The Five Visions tell her to lift others, not stand above them; Austrinism tells her that what Jewels did is an abomination. To believe Austre is to set herself above this woman; to spare Jewels the judgement is to deny her god. She has never had to put the two in the same sentence before. Denth joins her on the balcony with the news that the raid went perfectly. He explains why a stack of stolen salt is worth a fortune to her father's army: the spice merchant's cellar held nearly all of T'Telir's salt; without it Hallandren cannot preserve fish for the march on Idris, and the thieves will smuggle the stock abroad. Each small strike adds up.
She asks him about Jewels's faith, then about his own. He shrugs the gods of Hallandren off as a religion you can at least walk over and talk to. His own family is long dead; their faiths are forgotten; he never joined them. He does not believe in much and has not in a long time. She pushes harder. He is paid less than his swordsmanship is worth, he passes up money he could trivially have taken, he gives orders more than he receives them, he reacts to nothing — *except*, she says, to Vasher. Who, she asks, are you? *I'm a mercenary*, he answers, the lazy face gone. *Who were you?* He tells her she does not want to know, and leaves her on the dark wooden balcony alone.