POV: lightsong
Summary
Lightsong has been refused entry to Allmother's palace fourteen times in a row. On the fifteenth, the Returned goddess's priestess explains apologetically that her mistress has now forbidden any priestess to be allowed to ask if Lightsong can come in — and has likewise barred the inverse, and the side door, and the letter, and the relayed message. *She's getting better,* he tells the woman cheerfully. He has Scoot set up his pavilion in Allmother's own courtyard. He is going to live here, in front of her palace, until she relents.
He produces a small grey Lifeless squirrel from a box, gives it the security phrase his people have installed, and tells it loudly to enter the palace, find the Returned within, run in circles screeching, evade every guard, and destroy as much furniture as possible. The squirrel shoots between a guard's legs and is gone. Llarimar points out, mildly, that a squirrel's brain probably is not capable of an itinerary that detailed. They will see, Lightsong says, and reaches for his grapes. From inside the palace, almost at once, come shouts.
He waits with a percussion band turned up loud and eats sparingly so as not to need a privy. Several hours pass. Eventually a frazzled priestess emerges to inform him, with no ceremony left, that her grace will see him now. *Must I come now?* he asks, listening to the musicians' bridge. *Can't I finish the song?* He rises.
Allmother is still in her audience chamber, stocky on a court-scale throne, white-haired, working through a line of petitioners. She does not look at him. She listens to a lame Idrian dock-worker explain that he came down from the highlands when frost killed his crops, took work on a Hallandren storm-fishing boat, and lost the use of a leg to a runaway barrel; she grants him a job sewing nets through a man on the docks who owes her allegiance, plus food enough to last to his first wages, and dismisses him with a blessing. The man falls to his knees crying. Lightsong watches in silence. *Is it me,* he thinks, glancing at Allmother's lined face, *or does she look older than she did before?* It is impossible — Returned do not age past maturity — and yet.
She takes him to a side room with the recaptured squirrel bundled and tied in a junior priest's arms. *Yours, I am told?* He retracts the order, blandly. He acquired it, then, by *accidental* Command. *Stupid squirrel.* She rounds on him without warning. What in the name of the Colors does he think he is doing — out there, in public, in front of her supplicants? *The people are saying the Returned are growing weak; the best of us died years ago.* If the city believes that, the priesthoods stop receiving Breaths. Has he considered that his flippancy could cost all of them their tithes? She remembers — though she does not say so — the kind of Returned who used to take the time to hear each petitioner in person and try to help. Like Calmseer did.
He plays it as a shrug. *Seems an awful lot of trouble.* Then, because the squirrel was always the long way around to what he came for, he gives her the real reason. Blushweaver now holds two sets of Lifeless Commands — half Hallandren's armies. If the war votes through, that makes her the second-most-powerful person in the kingdom after the God King. He has decided the best brake on her is for one other Returned to hold two sets as well. He gives Allmother his command-phrase: *bottom line blue.*
She stares at him a long time. *Calmseer trusted you,* she says finally. *Her one flaw.* He braces for the lecture. Instead, she gives him back her own phrase: *verdant bells.* He nearly chokes. She had been calling him a fool five minutes ago. She tells him, calmly, that she has spent the week looking at her own paintings — every canvas, all week, has come back full of circles in red and gold. His colours. *Coincidence,* he says. She snorts. Something is moving in the city: the riots in the Idrian slums, the priests sniping more openly in the assembly. She is not letting him wiggle out of being a god, however thoroughly he intends to keep pretending otherwise. She has decided to start doing a better job of being one herself, she tells him; perhaps he should too.
He retreats out the way he came, walking very carefully. Two of the four Lifeless Command sets are now bonded across two Returned — Blushweaver's two, and his and Allmother's two. He is, Allmother said as he left, *curious* to see how he handles them.