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Siri sweeps through the palace in a near-gossamer green gown turning the matter over: something must happen to God Kings not long after their wives produce an heir, Bluefingers said as much, and the priesthood is plainly in a hurry now after fifty years of patience. She wonders whether the treaty itself spells the danger out — and curses herself for never reading it properly back home.

Bluefingers is, of course, exactly the man she needs. She catches him in a side room writing on his ledger; he goes wide-eyed and ducks straight through the next doorway, and when she gets there the room is empty. Her senior serving woman swears no household servant would dare avoid the queen. Right, Siri thinks: just like every other time. She cannot take books from the palace library, the city volumes that are brought in are read aloud by priests who can quietly skip whatever they wish her not to hear, and her scribes have nothing to say.

There is one other place in the court where she has been allowed to sit in public and have anyone speak to her freely. She orders a box prepared at the arena.

The arena is nothing like the running contests boys held back in Idris. Half a dozen events run at once — stones thrown for distance, men racing in dust circles, javelins, leaping, archery — and the Hallandren athletes compete in nothing but loincloths. Siri watches with a permanent maroon blush, fascinated less by the bare skin than by the discipline; the events seem judged less by winning than by the quality of what is shown, which is almost an Idrian sensibility upside-down. She forces herself to look away and work. Lightsong the Bold, gold and red, is in his pavilion; she rises with her train and crosses to him.

He greets her with the same exaggerated uselessness as before — claims to know nothing, then lets Llarimar do the actual answering. She rallies. If his reputation is for being useless, she has heard better than that: he is harmless, she tells him, and the only thing he has harmed in this conversation is her sense of reason and her head. He laughs. He likes her, he says.

She asks her real question: what happened to the previous God Kings? They gave away their Breath to heal, Lightsong says, glancing to Llarimar. Llarimar supplies the names and dates. Susebron the Fourth died fifty years ago curing a distrentia plague that was killing the very young and very old and halting T'Telir's commerce; he had married the year before and his only child had been born weeks before he died. The king before him gave himself up to heal children of a village raided by bandits — a story the commoners love; he had been married years earlier, but died only a month after his second child was born. The first child, Siri asks, was a daughter? Yes. A woman of no divine powers.

The pattern lands. Both deaths within months of an heir. Both wrapped in propaganda — a plague, a village of suffering children — both perfectly available as cover. Llarimar, evidently a kinder man than Treledees, suggests she hire a professional storyteller out of the city for the real histories. Siri realises immediately that if she orders one to her own palace the priesthood will simply send a teller who tells the official line — so she asks Lightsong instead, on the pretext that she would like him there for questions. He shrugs and agrees.

Before she can leave he stops her: she promised to answer his questions, too. He asks, with a casual that is plainly not casual, about the city guards of her hometown — whether they investigated murders unbidden, what their methods were, how they worked. She does her best to describe police she has barely thought about. He laughs the questions off as if they had no weight, then walks her out to the rail above the contests for a private word. He calls her game a dangerous one: she has chosen the persona of an innocent newcomer and it suits her, but she needs to refine it. People cannot trust what they cannot predict; she does not need to lie about who she is, only make use of who she is, until she is read as a familiar quantity rather than a threat. He uses himself as the example — a known fool, by design, working with what he was given. Then he gives her two warnings. First: Idris and Hallandren are not opposites so much as inversions of each other, and her people's extreme plainness is just as much a national costume as the Hallandren colours. Second, said with a sudden plain seriousness that startles her: please do not depend on him. If her plot comes to its crisis and she finds herself in real danger, she must not think of him for help. He promises, from his heart, that he will fail her. With that he wanders back to his couch and waves her servants in.