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Lightsong watches Siri hurry from his pavilion in her gold and blue and feels an unfamiliar twinge of guilt. He had spoken about Susebron's expected death in his usual flippant register, on the assumption that bluntness was kindest, and had not expected the Idrian princess to take it as personally as she did. Looking back, he tells himself she is barely more than a girl — though, as a Returned of five years, she has in fact been alive longer than he has — and that he should have remembered how few options a court widow would have if her God King killed himself. He decides her distress is about losing her station and turns his attention back to the arena floor.

The priests below have finished with sewage and city patrols and moved on to war. The atmosphere is uglier than at previous councils. Nanrovah, Stillmark's high priest and the court's most consistent voice against military action, is now spearheading the call for it. That is what catches Lightsong's attention. For five years he has held no vote that mattered, holding only one set of Lifeless Commands and cultivating an image of cheerful uselessness. He is no longer sure his irrelevance is sustainable.

Blushweaver joins him in a rustle of cloth and perfume and a particularly aggressive bodice. She did not turn Nanrovah, she tells him; she does not know who did, and the speed of his pivot is exactly the sort of thing that makes people assume it was her. Hopefinder's and Mercystar's Lifeless are now hers in name as well as ours, which means between the two of them they hold three of the four sets of Commands — roughly thirty thousand soldiers — and Lightsong privately wonders what in the Iridescent Tones he has let himself be drawn into. The remaining ten thousand belong to Allmother, and she will not give the security phrases up. Blushweaver needs them — she will not gamble a war on the chance of Allmother's force turning on theirs — and asks him to go talk to her, since Allmother hates him less than she hates everyone. He agrees. He also asks Blushweaver about a tunnel complex he has been hearing of, beneath the Court. She shrugs: there are storage tunnels under some palaces; her high priestess once offered to dig hers into the main network and she refused, not out of caution but because she did not want to listen to the work.

A short way along the walkway, Siri watches the same priests and listens herself daunted: her husband will likely be murdered or coerced to suicide inside a year, her homeland is about to be invaded by the kingdom her husband nominally rules and cannot speak to forbid, and the part of her that secretly enjoys the intrigue makes her ashamed of herself. One of the pro-war priests mentions the *Idrian agent* haunting the city, said to be a princess of the royal line. The room laughs the rumour off as obviously fabricated for the masses; Siri privately agrees, picturing Vivenna in her stony Idrian dress trying to navigate the court, and admits to herself for the first time that Vivenna would have made a worse queen than she has.

A tall, dark-haired goddess in revealing green and silver materialises behind her. Blushweaver does not bother with pleasantries: Lightsong is the last good man in the court, she will not have a country girl with Idrian scheming in her eyes drag him into anything, and if Siri tries it she will destroy her. She turns and walks away muttering an insult about beds. Siri, stunned and furious by turns, flees back to the palace.

There she sinks gratefully into her bath, attendants cutting her hair short again as they do every night, and is interrupted by Bluefingers — who walks into the bathing chamber over her embarrassment, tells her tartly that he has daughters twice her age, and waves the Pahn Kahl serving women in brown into a deliberate clatter of water to mask the conversation. She comes to him as a queen, not a child: politics is exchanges, and she has information to trade. She probes what he believes about how the old God Kings died and learns that he, too, suspects coercion; the official story about the previous king curing a plague has him out of the city when the curing supposedly happened. He talks honestly about his own stakes, which are not small: he is Pahn Kahl in a Hallandren theocracy, he has built a place for his people inside the palace over years of careful work, and a new God King will mean a new staff. More than that, he has cleaned Susebron's rooms since Susebron was a boy and does not want him dead.

He does not, Siri realises, know that Susebron is mute. He still imagines the God King being talked or threatened into spending his Breath aloud. She does not correct him. She tells him instead that she has been speaking with Susebron, that he is not what Bluefingers thinks, and that this need not end with his death or with the Pahn Kahl losing their posts. She proposes a private deal: she will look after his people if her plans succeed; in return, if she fails, he will get her and Susebron out of the palace. Bluefingers agrees. To lift the proposal above her own bare authority she lies in the same breath that Susebron is aware of the danger and that the contact was his idea. Bluefingers frowns at the God King's sudden initiative but accepts it, bows, and withdraws. Siri sits in the cooling water trying to decide whether she has just won something or merely committed to it.