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Lightsong sits on the edge of his bed with sweat on his brow, having asked his priests to wake him before dawn. The dream is still in his head: he was a man on a battlefield without a weapon, watching friend after friend die around him, and he had known each one. He tells himself that the dream means nothing — he is thinking about war because the assembly is debating war, not because he is a god — but he cannot ignore that his friends in the dream were not in Hallandren colours. They were Idrians. He was watching the battle through an Idrian soldier's eyes.

Llarimar presses him gently for what he saw. Lightsong gives him only the safer images: Blushweaver with her face flushed red, Llarimar himself asleep, the God King crying. He keeps the recurring symbols — the glowing red panther, the tempest, a young woman's face being absorbed by darkness — to himself. The scribe writes; Llarimar does not press further for once. It is Lightsong's feast day, so a Drab will arrive shortly to be drained for him. Before he is led off, he asks for two dozen urns painted after the colours of every god of the court, and a great many pebbles. Llarimar places the order without asking what it is for.

Later, fed and feeling himself again, Lightsong sits in a pavilion just inside the court's front gate and tosses pebbles into the colour-coded urns. When Blushweaver arrives — *what in the name of the Iridescent Tones are you doing?* — he diverts her with a riff about why divine names are not used as oaths and then notes she is more grumpy than usual. Allmother, she explains. Allmother now refuses even to speak with her. She offers to take him back to her palace and frolic to cheer him up; he calls her incorrigible; she invokes her godhood of lust and honesty and asks what the pebbles are for.

Counting, he tells her. Each pebble in an urn represents a priest who entered the court through the front gates wearing the colours of that god, since before sunrise. He has had servants doing this for six hours. Some gods have drawn a hundred priests; a few — including Mercystar — have drawn barely a dozen. He intends to send watchers to her palace next, and is confident they will find her full complement of priests already inside. They are not arriving by the gates. They are coming up out of the tunnels.

Blushweaver is briefly impressed and then exasperated. He reaches under the couch and produces a small box. Inside it is a grey squirrel — a Lifeless rodent, sutured perfectly, blood replaced with ichor-alcohol, holding still as a stone in his palm. The person who broke into Mercystar's palace used this as a distraction, he tells her. His own priests took weeks to override its Commands, because overriding a Lifeless without the security phrases requires a long process involving Breath and torture, and the better the original Awakener the longer it takes. Blushweaver pivots back to her own concern: this is exactly why they need Allmother's Commands before something happens to Allmother and her ten thousand are stranded. Lightsong notes mildly that the God King and several of Allmother's priestesses also hold those Commands — a single assassination would not, on its own, lose them the army.

The squirrel is the point, he says. Whoever made it was a powerful Awakener who wasted his work releasing the creature in Mercystar's palace as cover for slipping into the tunnels — and the man who saw what he was doing was murdered to keep him silent. The tunnels are storage, yes, but they would also be a perfect place to run something clandestine: each palace is a little autonomous country in the eyes of city law, and connecting their cellars under the wall would give an operator a private door into the court. Blushweaver points out, reasonably, that if the operation were really secret its priests would not be using the same tunnels as their public route. He concedes the point, flushes, and turns the conversation on himself.

He asks her why he is the way he is. She has always assumed it was contrast for its own sake. *No*, he tells her. From the day he Returned he refused to believe he was a god, and he has acted accordingly — and got cleverer at it — every year since. The man he used to be hated unexplained things, hated secrets, kept warning him he is no god, kept prompting him to dig. He is only beginning to learn how many secrets there are in this court. He stands. Blushweaver, surprised, asks where he is going. *To see Allmother*, he says, *about her Lifeless Commands.*