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Siri sits on Susebron's bed in her shift while he sits on the floor beside her, back against pillows, tablet on his knees. She is afraid that once she has given him an heir he will tire of life and find a way to release his Breath; he assures her in his block-letter charcoal that what he holds is not ordinary Breath and that, by everything his priests have taught him about BioChroma, he cannot give it away. He has lived fifty years with no information and no one to talk to, he writes; he is not going to kill himself now that he has learned to write, has discovered her.

He asks her to grow her hair and to make it red. She mocks his Hallandren taste for bright colours — her people consider red the most shameful shade of all — but he flushes at the thought he has offended her and she gentles immediately. She explains *flirtatious* to him, then demonstrates: a tossed head, hair flushing yellow to auburn midmotion, length spilling down her back as the locks grow on command. She tries a seductive look, finds it absurd, and laughs herself onto the bed. He writes *you are very strange,* and she agrees that she is no seductress. He reads on, learning *seductress* from his children's storybook and guessing — with embarrassment — that the evil queen in the tale was probably not offering the prince food.

He confesses that the storybook is his only real frame of reference, that he cannot tell his adult reading of it from his childhood one, and that her flirtation and her sarcasm both — behaviours where she acts the opposite of what she means — leave him afraid he will never understand her. She tells him, head on his arm, that most people in Idris understood her far less than he does; that they kept telling her to be her sister Vivenna, the one who was supposed to come south in her place. He writes back that Vivenna sounds boring, that Siri is full of colour on the inside and the priests and servants of the palace are not. Her hair shifts unbidden from red to gold; she pulls a little closer to him.

Her stomach growls and he insists on summoning food despite her worry about exposing themselves. He throws his black overrobe off, mussies his hair and undergown into something passably dishevelled, and raps at the door; servants arrive within minutes with an enormous spread — roasted fish, pickled vegetables, simmering mussels, Pahn Kahl tinkfans and a bowl of exotic fruit in sauce — none of which they could possibly have just cooked. Siri reflects, half awed and half ashamed for her countrymen at home, that the kitchen keeps full meals waiting on the chance their god grows hungry. She spreads a blanket on the floor, Susebron sits down across from her in his undergown, and they eat by candlelight. She inhales tinkfans by the fistful; he tells her, scandalised, that one is meant to take small bites with bread between to clear the palate, and then — after watching her cram a second into her mouth — picks one up and eats it whole himself. He admits that as God King he is never allowed to finish a single dish, that servants used to hold his spoon for him as a boy, and that he would rather have been born a peasant.

Siri turns the conversation to politics. They have to find a way to expose what his priests have been doing to him — to let him communicate through someone outside their control. Notes? Servants? A Pahn Kahl attendant? He punctures each idea in turn: no one would believe a note thrown from his window was his, his servants are the priests', no Pahn Kahl attends him personally, and when he leaves the palace he is surrounded by hundreds — Awakeners, soldiers, Lifeless, priests — who would whisk him away before he could make any scene. He suggests, instead, that they work *with* the priests and ask them why the old God Kings really die. *No*, Siri says, *not yet. Let me think.*

Then, quietly: would he consider running away with her? Back to Idris? He frowns at his board. *That seems extreme,* he writes. But if she can prove the priests intend to kill him and find someone to smuggle them both out of the palace, he will go. He does not believe it will come to that. Siri tells him she hopes he is right. Privately, she has already decided that if her plan works, the two of them will leave whether he believes in the danger by then or not.