POV: vivenna
Summary
A week sleeping in gutters changes Vivenna's sense of who she is. She sold her hair on the second day for a depressingly small handful of coin, every bit of which went into food that did not fill her stomach. The cut was a hackwork job, and what little hair remains is matted with soot — the pale white showing through only where the dirt thins. Without the Breath she invested in the shawl she has no strength to regrow it, and she does not dare go to a Breath market to sell her Breath either, even if she knew how; Denth is sure to be watching the places one would go. She has no idea how to draw the Breath back out of the shawl in the first place.
So she sits on street corners holding out her hand. The other beggars somehow make this work; she does not. She does not know where to sit, how to plead, how to make the eyes of passers find her instead of slide past. She is afraid in equal measure that Denth or Vasher will spot her and that she will starve if she stays invisible. The more hungry she gets the more the second worry crowds out the first. She has learned to ignore her stomach. She watches the bright Hallandren crowds pass like spokes of a colour wheel, telling herself that none of them will ever recognise a princess in a beggar in a shift.
She still does not really believe what Denth and the others did. The memory of the cellar will not connect to her memories of their jokes, and she catches herself preparing to rise and go find them as if the betrayal were a hallucination she could shake off. Her mind has been working badly ever since she became a Drab. She had not realised that giving up Breath dulled the head as well as the colour. She cannot go to Denth. Parlin is dead. The city authorities would arrest her on the rumours about the Idrian princess making trouble. If her father has sent more agents south she has no way of finding them without exposing herself, and Denth has probably killed them already. The soup kitchens are out: at the first one she tried she saw Tonk Fah across the street and ran. The city gates are out for the same reason. She has no supplies for the road north anyway. The only money she gets goes immediately into food.
A city guard nudges her with a truncheon and tells her she cannot beg on this corner. There are apparently rules about where the lowest are allowed to sit; nobody bothers to tell the lowest what those rules are. *Laws are things of lords and gods, not the lowly*, she thinks, and notices how naturally she has begun to think of lords as some other species. She gets up, dizzy, and shuffles off into the crowd, which gives her a wide berth — for her smell, but also, she suspects, for fear of being robbed; they need not have worried, she has no skill at cut-pursing yet.
She drifts back into the Idrian slum, where her northern accent has bought her a thin slice of acceptance. Nobody here has recognised her as a princess since the man who took her dress. She goes hunting for a place to sleep. Her favourite alley is full of grim men doing something obviously illegal; she leaves quickly. Her second favourite is full of the urchins who already beat her once — on day two, when she tried to keep a single coin from selling her hair instead of spending it on food, and learned where she stood in the pecking order, which is below everyone, urchins included. The third alley is empty, beside a bakery whose ovens have not yet been stoked but will warm the wall against her back before dawn. She lies down on the bricks, clutches the shawl with all her hidden Breath tight against her chest, and is asleep before she can frame the next thought.