POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna takes a meeting with Thame on the patio of a fine T'Telir restaurant, sipping addictive lukewarm juice and wishing for Idrian ice. Thame confirms the rally in three days — over a hundred influential Idrian expatriates, men loyal to her father in the way Denth's background checks could verify — though it goes unstated that *influential* here means men whose stature depends on the underclass they speak for, the way Lemex's did. He says perhaps ten thousand Idrians live in the city, most of them farmers driven down out of the highlands by failed crops, royal land tenure they cannot escape, and the impossibility of leaving a starving family for the weeks a petition to the king would cost. The truth of Idris under her father, she admits, is a bureaucratically scattered kingdom that does not always reach the people it owns.
Thame bows despite her wishing he wouldn't and withdraws. Denth takes his seat. People interest him, he says — particularly the ones who do not act the way they are supposed to. He means her. The look of quiet displeasure has gone out of her eyes; she is starting to fit in. She protests that she does not want to fit in. He counters as the mercenary: blending in keeps her from being connected to the rumours of an Idrian princess hiding in the city, Parlin in his bright vest now passes for an T'Telir tough without effort, and trousers would be cheaper than foreign-cut modest dresses and would not force them to take meetings in restaurants like this one. She has been growing into things — the raids feel easy, moving with a crowd feels natural, working with mercenaries no longer scandalises her — and she does not know how to tell what she still believes from what she has merely got used to.
They drain their cups and rise. Clod joins them at the door. Tonk Fah has lost his monkey again, and Denth observes drily that of all the universe's mercies the greatest is that Tonk Fah has never fathered a child. They gather Parlin and Jewels on the way and head for the D'Denir Garden — a grassy memorial square crowded with hundreds of weathered D'Denir, said to be the final gift of Peacegiver the Blessed for those who died in the Manywar. The statues stand in still rows under their incongruous scarves and hats, more solid than the city around them.
Denth warns her, as they approach, that forgers are the most dangerous men in the Hallandren underground — not the scribes who do the work but the brokers who place documents into the right hands of the bureaucracy and make them legally real. The forgers are picnicking by an old D'Denir with a weathered axe, a tableau of perfect harmless innocence. Denth spreads a blanket for Vivenna by the next statue over and stands as a manservant while she negotiates, the men beside them never quite looking across. She wants letters that read like correspondence between named members of the Hallandren priesthood and her father, with seal and signature, building a case of years of extortion: priests forcing King Dedelin to pay outrageous sums and make outrageous promises to keep Hallandren from going to war. She hands the lead forger a letter she has from her father in his own hand and seal, with the instructions written on the back. He nods. It is possible. A servant flutters a napkin, palms her paper with it, and they pack up and go.
Denth tells her she is becoming an expert. Her next appointment, with thieves who have stripped useful documents out of the Hallandren war offices to sow confusion, is hours off. She wanders the statues; Denth and Tonk Fah trail at a polite distance and trade bad poetry rhyming *blood* with *mud* and *thud* and *tastebud*. Across the lawn Parlin is making Jewels laugh. Vivenna's hair shifts red without her noticing until Denth tells her, then teases that her father had always wanted her to marry Parlin anyway, and that Jewels has other ties and she should stop worrying. She has no good answer.
She moves on alone among the statues, thinking about contradictions: warriors as monuments to peace, Idrian liaisons who exploit and protect their own at once, mercenaries who turn out to be among the best men she has known. And, over it all, the Breath in her chest — the buzz of life around her, the way fallen twigs and folded cloth feel half-remembering being alive, the temptation she now genuinely feels to wake them. She watches Denth and tells herself he has only managed it because he divorces what he believes from what he does, and that the moment one starts down that road one is lost. So: no Awakening for her. If the Breath tempts her further she will give the lot away to someone who has none, and become a Drab herself.