POV: siri
Summary
Siri lies on the bed in only a shift under a sheet, the bedchamber fire low, while Susebron sits in his chair beside her and asks her — board and charcoal on his knee — to tell him about the mountains. His handwriting has grown into something near elegant, and the more he writes, the more he understands. She admits, ruefully, that her tutors back in Idris would have a field day with how badly she now regrets refusing them. She describes the highlands as well as she can: rocks reared so high no people could ever stack their like, green in a different way than his jungles, surfaces that climb toward Austre's domain in the sky.
He stops. *Austre?* She blushes and tries to explain. Not a Returned. Not the kind of god he is. A force, something that watches over the worthy and punishes those who do not do what is right — and *no*, she has never seen him, and yes, she knows how that sounds. She names Vo the First Returned and his Five Visions as the Idrian anchoring point for any of it. He listens, fascinated rather than offended; he had been told nothing about other religions. He concludes solemnly that he would like to meet this Austre very much. She offers him the monks. He frowns at the mockery; he likes mockery, having had so little of it.
He writes, then, that he wishes she could go home to see those mountains — that he could explain it to the priests in artisans' script, the writing system they taught him so he could communicate with them. She pales. They cannot let Treledees know he can read. She turns the talk to her real fear: the previous two God Kings died within months of an heir. *You have no proof of that*, he writes. She knows. But the timing is wrong, the priests' urgency is wrong, and something about BioChroma must be the lever. How does a God King pass on his Breath? He does not know.
She works the question out aloud. Bluefingers told her the God Kings are given two Breaths every week; Susebron now admits that some weeks the offering is three or four. He needs only one a week to live. The priesthood cannot let that hoard die with him — so when a child is born they take the Breaths from the father and give them to the son, and the father dies. Susebron objects: a Returned cannot Awaken with his own Breath, so the hoard ought to be useless. She presses him — *only the Breath you were born with? Or also the ones added on top?* He does not know. She is willing to bet he could use them if he tried. Why else cut out his tongue?
He crosses the room to the window. She follows in her shift, presses the board back into his hands, and finds out what is actually upsetting him: she does not believe in his godhood. He had decided that is the only reason she is interesting to him, and the only reason she treats him as she does, and he is afraid it is. She tells him otherwise — that the worshippers are the ones who don't understand him, that even inside the palace Bluefingers and many of the Pahn Kahl serving girls don't believe and yet serve him well, that he could use someone willing to look past the divinity. Beauty for him, he tells her, is not what other men see in a face; his vast Breaths turn every face into one composite of colour and pattern, all of them wonderful, none of them more so than another, and the only way he could call her beautiful was to mean it about something else. *The most beautiful thing in the mountains has already come down to me.* She blushes and changes the subject. He sets the board aside and, hesitantly, puts an arm around her shoulders at the window.
The morning after the D'Denir Garden forgery meeting, Denth hurries Vivenna back to the garden before the city guard can clear the bodies. Four men dead in the grass, blood drying. To her Heightened eyes the colours of dead skin are wrong by an exact, intrinsic shade; the colour of the blood and the green of the grass make almost a violet together. Then she sees it: the wounds themselves are black at the edges, and the skin around each is drained pale, as if the cut itself had spread a disease.
They were the thieves the team worked with the day before, Denth tells her, and the killer is Vasher and his sword. He and Tonk Fah argue what to do: take the sword from him, or make him draw it and kill him quickly afterwards. Jewels cuts in. *He beat Arsteel.* Denth snaps that he did not, not in a duel, that there must have been an ambush or a trick. *There was no blackness in Arsteel's wounds*, Jewels says. They move out into the street with Clod closing ranks around her, and Vivenna, itching, feels someone with a great deal of Breath watching her from somewhere she cannot see.
On the roof above the street stands Vasher. He does not care who sees him; he rarely does. He watches *VaraTreledees — Denth, as he calls himself now* — and his team. Nightblood greets the sight of an old friend brightly and asks whether Shashara is here too. *We killed Shashara long ago, Nightblood,* Vasher tells him, *just like we killed Arsteel.* Just like we will eventually kill Denth. The sword, as always, refuses to acknowledge his maker's death; she made him to destroy evil, he says, she would be proud, they should go show her. He is too good at it, Vasher thinks. He fixes on the *clueless princess* in her foreign dress — so many things are falling apart because of her, he does not know where Denth found her, and he is sorely tempted to jump down and feed her to Nightblood. But the four deaths the night before have already drawn too much notice. He turns away. Later.