POV: lightsong
Summary
Lightsong spends a morning at his own pavilion finding out what kind of man he used to be. A pottery wheel comes first — he cannot keep clay on it long enough to call the result anything — and then five lemons off a table, which he juggles immediately, and a guava his startled servants hand him into the pattern as he asks for it. He has discovered, by quiet experiment, that he knows sailing terms he never learned, that he is good at sketching and arithmetic, that he is hopeless at gardening and sculpting, and that he has the muscled body of a man who does manual work despite his life of pillows and fruit. Blushweaver arrives in the middle of it and watches him drop a lemon. The skills, he tells her, are not Lightsong's; they are the man's whose name he no longer has. She would rather not know who she was. He thinks it is dishonest of her to pretend she has never wondered.
They walk toward Hopefinder's palace under servants' parasols, sparring in the easy familiar way — she suggesting an experiment of a different sort, he refusing — and arrive at a lavender-and-silver building with a three-table pavilion already set. Hopefinder the Just, god of innocence and beauty, returned at two and now in the body of a stiff thirteen-year-old, greets them with formal courtesy. Lightsong watches him through the chilled soup. Like all young Returned, Hopefinder grew mentally into an adult inside his first year and will keep growing physically until his body crosses into prime adulthood, at which point he will stop. By time in the court he is six years Lightsong's senior — an enormous gap when most gods last twenty.
Blushweaver turns the conversation, by stages, to the rumours coming out of the city: poisoned supply stations, stolen war plans, an Idrian agent rumoured to be a second princess. Hopefinder is uninterested. The new queen is performing her duty, an heir will arrive, the kingdom will settle. He has watched Blushweaver visit a series of his colleagues on the same errand and knows what she is here for. He names her price himself. He has had no use for his Lifeless in eleven years and expects no use for them in eleven more. Blushweaver is welcome to the Commands of all ten thousand — for her vote on the court's social council, every week, in Hopefinder's favour, for as long as either of them lives. The pavilion goes silent. *Done*, she says, before he has finished telling her how cleverly he has trapped her, and swears it in front of priests of both houses.
Lightsong, watching, feels his picture of her crack. The posturing about a coming war is not posturing. The woman across from Hopefinder is afraid, and has just sold her standing vote in perpetuity to be sure of the army that defends the kingdom. He, who controls a quarter of Hallandren's armies and does not believe in his own divinity, has no business chastising another god for taking his sacred trust lightly. And then, for an instant, like an unremembered fragment of a dream: a shining room of steel, glowing, reflective. A prison.
Hopefinder dismisses the servants and gives the security phrase — *a candle by which to see*, the title of a poem even Lightsong knows — then leaves to be elsewhere when the social-court vote comes up that evening. *Why do I feel like we've just been manipulated?* Lightsong asks. Blushweaver tells him cheerfully that they have only been manipulated if there is no war. If there is, between them they now control two gods' worth of Lifeless — Hopefinder's, and Mercystar's, which she had taken in trade the day before on the strength of Lightsong's investigation of the palace murder.
She wants to know what that investigation had really been for. He stops dodging. He thinks he was, in his other life, some kind of officer of the law — a sheriff, an investigator, someone who interrogated witnesses for a living. He is, he says, dead serious about it. He suspects he would prove a dangerous duelist too, if anyone ever handed him a sword. He cannot, however, work out how juggling lemons fits into any of it.