POV: siri
Summary
Siri wakes alone again in Susebron's bed near noon, the single sheet too warm to keep on, and lies a while staring at the ceiling. She has come to look forward to the quiet, written conversations of their nights together — the unpracticed letters in his hand explaining tender, surprising thoughts — and to her own happiness in Hallandren, which is not what she expected. But Susebron is in real danger and is innocent of the fact, and no one else knows, and the only person in any position to act is the one princess who spent her childhood ignoring every lesson that might have prepared her for it. She decides she has wasted enough time being ashamed about that and gets up. Politics is exchanges, Lightsong has told her — not too innocent, not too clever, average — and what she has to trade is information. She burns the morning's sheets in the hearth as she always does, then, as her serving women dress her, draws a young Pahn Kahl girl in brown aside and whispers a message for Bluefingers: she has vital information, she will trade, it could change his plans. Then she has to work out what that information is.
At Lightsong's box at the arena he greets her with a hug, calls for grapes, and deflects her question about why he is called Lightsong the Bold with a string of jokes — only god bold enough to act like an idiot, names assigned at random by a drunk monkey, dreams of insulting a panther — before letting the actual answer surface: a person, said the priests, comes back if they died exemplifying some greater attribute, and bravery is what his dreams suggest of his. He does not know how he died, what work he did, or who he was. Siri tells him she suspects he was a diplomat or a salesman; he agrees too quietly, then shakes it off and announces a surprise.
The surprise is the bleach-bearded storyteller Hoid, whom Lightsong has fetched at her standing request. Siri asks for Hallandren's origins; Hoid drops trickles of coloured sand, leaves, glitter, dust, paper, and metal from his pockets in turn as he speaks. The Chedeshi sailors found the jungle, full of paradise and the Tears of Edgli. The First Returned was born aboard one of their ships in this very bay, declared the Five Visions, and died a week later; his crew founded Hanald on the beach with his pregnant widow as their first queen. Three centuries of the Five Scholars and the rise of Awakening followed, then the Manywar — fought, Hoid says, partly over Edgli dye and partly over the discovery of a Command that let a Lifeless be made from a single Breath instead of fifty. Lifeless, he is careful to note, are no stronger or more skilled than living men; the advantage is that they never eat, never tire, never feel pain or fear. Strifelover — another name for Kalad the Usurper — refined them further into the Phantoms of unknown design, lost when Peacegiver sent them away and ended the war.
Siri presses for the part she actually came to hear. The royal house of Idris, Hoid says casually, descends from the First Returned's widow and her child; her ancestors took that blood with them into the highlands when they broke from Hallandren — a fact Siri has never heard at home. Lightsong finds her ignorance interesting. From there she asks how the God Kings have all died, and Hoid gives her the official story: five God Kings including Susebron in three hundred years, each fathering a stillborn son who Returns to take his place, each God King tiring of life once an heir exists and choosing to spend his Breath for the realm's benefit on the way out. He cannot explain how Peacegiver's gift of divinity passes from father to son without speech, only speculate that the founder left some seed of himself in the line.
The story is plausible to a stranger and impossible to Siri: Susebron cannot speak the Commands the story requires, and would not willingly leave a life he is so plainly enjoying. When Hoid notes that Returned tire and pass on once an heir is born, Lightsong turns the knife unwittingly by suggesting aloud that it might be best for Siri if Susebron *did* die — she could go home, an heir would rule, no harm done. Siri excuses herself and leaves the pavilion before he can see her cry.