POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna insists on meeting her countrymen, and Denth — fielding Tonk Fah, Jewels, and Clod as escort, leaving Parlin at home — walks her into the Highlands under protest. The slum's atmosphere is darker than any she has crossed in T'Telir: street toughs in black with red armbands, women calling from doorways, an air of suspicion turned in on itself. She pities the Idrians she imagines living in the middle of all of it. Denth stops her in the street to correct the picture. The slum's gangs and brothels are not what her countrymen *live among*. They are what her countrymen are. Once she starts looking she sees it everywhere — the Austre charms tucked unobtrusively into windowsills, the shepherd's caps, the grey and white worn beneath the violent colour. The realisation crystallises a fury she has been refusing for weeks: Hallandren has not merely impoverished her people, it has made thugs and prostitutes of them.
Thame meets them and leads her into a barren rubbish-strewn lot the locals call a park, where a crowd waits. She speaks to them — promises that the king cares, that she will bring them home — and the crowd, polite and indifferent, drifts off. Most came only to see whether the rumoured princess existed. The ones who stayed earn twice in the slum what they did in the highlands and have no interest in going back. Thame tells her gently that they came at all because *patriot* is the one identity Hallandren has not yet taken from them, and they will do anything to wound Hallandren just to keep it.
Thame takes her on across the lot to a half-shed half-pavilion where the three Idrian slumlords wait, each with bodyguards: Paxen the brothel-keeper, who wears his fine clothes naturally; Ashu who promotes the underground fights in which Idrian men box each other unconscious; and Rira — Thame's employer — sloppy in a way meant to look easy. All three carry the First Heightening at least; Rira has the third. Jewels and Clod post themselves at the door. Denth and Tonk Fah take stations behind her chair.
Vivenna tells them war is coming and asks them to stand for Idris. Paxen tells her freedom requires Idrian troops inside T'Telir; Ashu wants royal involvement before he risks another revolt like Vahr's; Rira wants to know whether her unmarried third sister's hand is bargainable. She stands up to leave. Rira stops her, draws an Austrin charm of obedience from beneath his shirt, and tells her his father carried him down from the highlands and died in the Edgli fields. He buys Breath and makes prostitutes of housewives, yes, and he sees that everyone in the Highlands eats; will she do better? Before she can answer, Vivenna's life sense flares — a great mass of people, close.
Purple-and-yellow uniforms of the T'Telir city watch flood the park, led by living guards but spearheaded by Lifeless who wade through the Idrian men's blades without slowing. The slumlords' people resist; the Lifeless begin to kill. Denth holds the alley mouth and shouts at Vivenna to run. Tonk Fah hauls her into the back streets. They burst out into another street where five Lifeless wait. Tonk Fah drops his sword and surrenders; the Lifeless charge anyway. He picks it up and tries to hold them, kills one through the neck and downs another, but is overrun before he can follow her.
Vivenna runs, trips on her skirt, tears it off, and finds herself cornered in an alley by three Lifeless closing from both ends. A length of rope lies in the refuse beside her stripped skirt. She knows the mechanics of Awakening from childhood tutoring she did her best not to listen to; she kneels and begs the rope to come to life. Nothing happens. She begs again. Still nothing. The first Lifeless reaches her — and is met in the air by a grey-skinned figure she does not recognise until he has lopped the head off another. Clod plants himself over her with a determination she did not know a Lifeless could carry, takes a blade through the belly killing the second, and finishes the third before turning aside a final knife crawl with a stab through the neck. Then he slumps to his knees in front of her, head bowed, clear ichor pouring out of him. Tonk Fah comes pelting up the alley, takes one look at Clod, and says Jewels is not going to be pleased.