POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna wanders the slums in daylight that feels like dusk, hand trailing along a sooty brick wall, hair still bleached white from the cellar. Parlin is dead because she dragged him south on what now reveals itself as the most idiotic quest of her life. Denth's whole team was working her, not for her, and looking back the warnings are everywhere: how conveniently he found her in the restaurant; how he used her to get at Lemex's Breath; the way Jewels supposedly worked against her own gods. She had been a prisoner the entire time and never known.
She has stayed in the slums on the theory that Denth will expect her to bolt for the open city he knows better than she does. A dead end stops her. A short, dark-haired man in patchwork slum clothing slides off a stack of boxes behind her. He recognises her from the slumlords' meeting — *you*, the woman wandering the slums in a beautiful white dress, the one half the city is now searching for. She begs him, Idrian to Idrian, to help. He draws a knife. He will not turn her in, but he wants the dress — that cloth will feed his family for weeks, and the dress is what is making everyone in the slums notice her. She thinks about Awakening; she cannot trust her hands to form a Command in the state she is in. So she stands and undoes the buttons.
He insists on the silk leggings as well, and she gives those up too, standing in only her shift in the middle of the alley. When the knife waves at the shift, something in her snaps. She screams *no, no, NO* in his face, falls to her knees, grabs handfuls of mud and refuse from the alley floor and rubs them into the cloth — *there, take it like this, sell it like this* — and the man clutches what he already has and runs.
She curls in the mud and weeps until rain starts to fall. It is a soft, low Hallandren rain, the wet drops kissing her face, runnels tracing the alley walls. With the rain comes a sliver of lucidity. She has to move. The dress was making her visible; the shift makes her one of the slum's wraiths. She crawls to a refuse pile and pulls out a stinking rag — maybe a shawl, maybe a rug — and wraps it across her shoulders for what modesty it offers. She tries to turn her hair black; it refuses to obey. Too tired to be angry, she works mud into the locks until the white shows as a sickly brown.
Wearing the shawl makes the cloth visibly brighter — the BioChromatic halo of a person carrying many Breaths. Every Awakener with the First Heightening in the city will see her glow from the far end of a street. She cannot hide in the slums while she carries that aura. Then she works out the answer. She did not feel Vasher in her bedroom; she did not feel Tonk Fah in the cellar. The rope she Awakened in Vasher's slum room — she cannot feel its Breath either. Invested Breath gives off no aura.
She ties the rope around her ankle, holds the shawl out in front of her, and speaks the same words Lemex used when he gave her his Breath in the first place. *My Life to yours. My Breath become yours.* All of it flows out of her into the cloth, no Command, just investment for safekeeping. The city around her goes silent — the sense of life and motion she has grown used to drops out of the world. Or perhaps it is Vivenna who has dropped out of the world: a Drab now, hair lifeless, skin colourless, eyes dull. She stands, shaking, in the drizzling rain, pulls the shawl with all its hidden Breath close against her chest, and shuffles away into the city.