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Siri is taking a long, slow tasting-meal on the court green when Treledees finds her. She has been deliberately not coming when the God King's high priest summons her, so he has had to come in person; she keeps him standing while she goes round another tray of seafood she does not particularly like, copying Susebron's tiny-bite court manner as practice. Lightsong wanders past in the distance, distracted, and returns her wave without coming over. *Pity,* she thinks. *I would have liked an excuse to keep him waiting longer.* When she finally rises she invites the priest to walk with her — *only the high priest himself, of course, would be worth interrupting one's lunch for* — and sets the rules of the conversation in a single sentence: the consort of the God King does not run when she is called.

Treledees smiles. The smile makes her uneasy at once, and within a few exchanges she realises why. Her hair is not staying black for him; the suppressed shifts she thinks she is hiding — pulses of red, ghosts of white — he is reading off her like print. He is a high priest of Hallandren; of course he holds a great many Breaths. A circle of grass around him stands a half-shade brighter than the rest of the lawn. She remembers, far too late, the tutors she ignored in Idris — the ones who tried to drill her into the same hair-control they had given Vivenna — and grits her teeth and forces the deepest, steadiest black she can manage. *Black, for confidence.* He looks away first.

Then he names the grievance. He has heard rumours. She is no longer doing her wifely duty. Is she pregnant? No, she says. Has she stopped trying? He confirms what she has only half-suspected: the priests have been listening in on the bedchamber every night, and on the first nights of her marriage a spy was physically in the room with them. They had to be sure the new Idrian bride did not intend to murder their god. They are, he tells her with quiet venom, still not convinced. She lets a slip of red show despite herself and decides to take the offensive. She admits she stopped trying on purpose — to get his attention — and forces the conversation onto Susebron himself: she has slept with the man, of course she has noticed he has no tongue, that he can barely use a privy without help, that he has the mind of a child. The lie inside the truth is deliberate; if the priests think she still believes Susebron a fool, they will not suspect that the two of them have learned to speak.

Treledees flushes — *he really does care about the God King,* she notes; this man is not for sale — and turns the conversation to the only thing the priests need from her: an heir. Why so eager, she asks. Why is it so urgent? He waves it off as a matter she could not understand. So she presses: *do you know anything of Hallandren history after my family departed?* He answers with theology. Lord Peacegiver left them a treasure — over fifty thousand BioChromatic Breaths — and a single commandment. Keep it safe. Do not use it. Everything the priesthood has done to its God King flows from that bequest. The God King himself does not own the treasure he carries; the priesthood does, on Peacegiver's behalf, and a tongueless, illiterate child of an emperor is easier to keep faithful to a god's instruction than a grown man would be. *If Susebron is so important,* she thinks, holding his gaze, *why are you planning to kill him?*

She closes by extracting one concession. She will resume her nightly act in exchange for replacing her principal serving women with the Pahn Kahl — she likes their browns, she tells him, and they too are exiles. Treledees reads it as a peasant girl's prejudice and grants it without argument. The Hallandren handmaids will continue in lesser roles; only the women who stand by her bed every night will be Bluefingers's.

Walking back to her pavilion, she allows herself a sober tally. She has antagonised the priest further, almost certainly burned any chance of being liked, but she has confirmed two things: that she can manipulate the priesthood, however clumsily; and that Bluefingers's people are now seated permanently within her chambers. She picks up another bit of fish. If it ever comes to running with Susebron, she means to have allies of her own already inside the walls.