POV: lightsong
Summary
Lightsong wakes a full hour before usual, hops out of bed in front of startled servants, and tells Llarimar that he will not be discussing last night's dream — an image of rain and tempest and a brilliant red panther, glasslike, waiting in the storm — and that he intends to go back to Mercystar's palace for reasons he cannot name. Llarimar manages only to detour him through the morning's art viewing.
The first painting stops him cold. Reds layered on reds, painted with the subtlety of a First Heightening, shapes that resolve into armies crashing against each other; at the centre a single woman caught mid-motion, head thrown back, holding a black sword that darkens the red sky around it. Llarimar names it the Battle of Twilight Falls — last conflict of the Manywar, the first battle in which Lifeless were fielded in large numbers — and then admits, when pressed, that he sees neither woman nor sword but only chaos. Lightsong calls it the best painting that has ever passed through his hall and tells Llarimar to keep it for his collection. The lesser priests scribble; Llarimar is troubled, because a god's reaction to art is prophecy and a god predicting a black sword at the close of the Manywar is not a comfortable thing.
He is in a foreign mood — eager, distracted, alive — and he knows what is causing it. There has been a murder in the court. He has spent his whole Returned life having everything he wanted handed to him through priests; only two things have ever been withheld, knowledge of his past and freedom to leave the court. Here is a third — a thing gone wrong inside the safe walls — and no one will mind if a useless god pokes at it. So he marches a clattering parasol-bearing entourage across to Mercystar's palace, where Mercystar is conveniently away visiting Allmother. The guards at the door balk; Llarimar confirms that they cannot forbid him without their goddess's direct order, and they fall aside.
Inside, his Heightened eyes pick out the patches of new wood where the bloodstained planks were replaced — and then a second patch farther on, the wrong colour by a hair, larger and not as new as the others. A trapdoor disguised as flooring. An unfamiliar prudence keeps him from giving the find away to the watching priest; he crawls past it pretending to look for snagged threads. The priest relaxes. He knows. And possibly so did the intruder.
Outside on the lawn, Lightsong separates the six witnesses into three groups well out of earshot of one another, sends the priest in charge to fetch the Lifeless squirrel in person — a small gratuitous indignity — and questions each group alone. The two doorway guards describe a big man with a ragged beard and unbright clothes, who choked them unconscious with the tassels of an Awakened coat and a boot, took care not to kill them, and carried a long straight sword more like an Easterner's blade than a dueling weapon. The three corridor servants describe the same man: ragged, dirty-looking but not actually dirty, who tied one of them with an Awakened rope, knocked another out, and threw a sheathed sword at them. One of the three — Lolan — was the one who stayed back; he had a bandaged hand.
Lightsong makes Lolan show him. The whole hand is grey, drained of colour. That is impossible. Awakening pulls colour from boards and clothing and furniture, not from living flesh. The man falls to his knees confessing brothels and dice-cheating and his own greed for the beautiful black sword, but swears he never saw the intruder kill anyone. Lightsong believes him, warns him to be good, and lets him stand. He congratulates himself on feeling, for once, faintly divine.
The young priest who saw the intruder flee was watching from the far side of the building, by the door where the intruder had first entered — a window on the wrong side for any of the killing. He saw a moving shadow, the two unconscious guards below, called the alarm, and lost several minutes getting downstairs to look, by which time the figure was gone.
Llarimar insists the morning's painting was a prediction and presses Lightsong to leave the investigation alone before he tangles himself in his own oracular threads. Lightsong refuses. He has a theory and it is plain to him: there were two intruders. The first, the big swordsman, took elaborate care not to kill — he left witnesses upright and unbound captives untouched, which a man planning to murder a tied victim does not do. The second came after the first, killed only the conscious servant who could have described him, and slipped back out. Both vanished, almost certainly through the trapdoor and whatever passages run beneath the palace.
He hands over the box with the furious Lifeless squirrel inside and asks Llarimar to set his Awakeners to cracking its Command phrase even though it is only an animal. What disturbs him is not the puzzle but the fact that he solved it. Everything he has done this morning — the separating of witnesses, the look that catches a lie, the word *case* for a murder he has never read about — felt natural in a way that nothing in his Returned life has ever felt. He did not have to learn to speak again or to walk again after he Returned; only personal memory was lost. Whoever he used to be evidently knew how to do this work. He had been on his way to convincing himself he had died falling off a stump while drunk. Llarimar will not say what kind of man he was, but Lightsong is no longer sure he wants to know — and yet cannot stop wanting to.