POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna wakes in a clean bed in cotton sleeping clothes, hair brushed out, body washed, in a room where Vasher is eating breakfast with the black sword leaning against the table beside him. She asks the only question her exhausted mind can produce. He snorts: a woman who has been to Denth's bed is not his temptation. He never touched her — he paid the woman who runs the building to clean her, dress her, and change her bedpan for the week she lay fever-sick. She has tramaria, he tells her, a lowland insect-fever the Idrian highlands do not know; she caught it weeks ago and it has been with her ever since. Yes, she had Denth fooled, he says. *Idiot.* She nods. He goes back to his meal.
She gets out of bed and eats the rest of his fish off his plate. He returns with the shawl, washed clean, and sets it on the table beside her. Yes, there is Breath in it; no, he cannot get to it. Only she can. She does not know the Command. He raises an eyebrow — she escaped his ropes without knowing the Command? — and tells her the words. *Your Breath to mine.* She lays a hand on the shawl and says them. The fever drops out of her. The dizziness vanishes. The deadened world floods back into colour — she can sense Vasher as a bright living pocket across the table, can feel herself again, can feel anything again. She actually falls out of her chair from the joy of it. He watches her without comment and notes that returning a Breath hoard after weeks of being a Drab hits like first taking it in. She has at least the Third Heightening, he tells her — she will not know sickness or really age, so long as she keeps it.
He throws her a pile of men's clothing — thick trousers, tunic, vest, all in blues — and tells her to put it on; he is not buying her dresses. She has work to do. When she asks, with the sword in his hand and the memory of the street still fresh, whether the work involves killing, he tells her Denth is *working toward something* and he intends to block him. She tries to defend her old position — *Denth was working for me, or pretending to.* He laughs out loud, and her hair turns red for the first time since the cellar. *Didn't it ever occur to you,* he asks her, very evenly, *that maybe you were the one on the wrong side?* The raids, the rabble-rousing in the slums, the showing herself to thug-lords, all of it engineered to make the Hallandren government believe that Idris was already attacking them — and engineered by someone in Hallandren who has been paying Denth for months to start the war. He had assumed she knew. He now grants, ungenerously, that she did not.
They walk through the Idrian slum together. The trousers feel strange. She keeps glancing over her shoulder. A waif on the curb watches her pass with the same kind of hungry calculation Vivenna herself was doing a week ago, and there is no triumph in noticing the difference. She has not even been competent at being beaten. Vasher paces beside her with the sword in his hand. He thinks the man behind Denth's contract is probably one of the gods, or a cabal of them, or perhaps a clutch of priests acting on their own. He does not know who. He does not know why.
Their first stop is a run-down building on a run-down corner. Vasher shoulders past the nervous gatekeeper, thumps down a staircase to a wood-floored cellar where a circle of Idrian community men sit on a rug, and pulls Vivenna forward by the arm. *Hair,* he says. She obliges, lets the colours roll through; the men bow their heads — *Princess.* She tells them honestly that she does not want her people to fight Hallandren, that Idris would lose, that she has been used. Vasher takes over and pushes the harder claim: the recent Lifeless slaughter in the slum was not Hallandren policy. It was broken Lifeless slipped into the patrol with orders to kill, planted to start the riots his unknown patron needs.
The elders are not persuaded by Vasher's manner. One man speaks for the rest: their families are starving here; they were Idrians once but the kingdom forgot them; what good does it do them now to defuse a slum that will get crushed anyway? Vivenna hears, suddenly, what her tutors had been wrong about for years: she had nothing in common with the Idrian in his highland village; she has begun to understand the Idrian of the T'Telir slum. She kneels on the rug. She is ashamed to be seen by them in men's clothes with shorn hair, she tells them, but she is asking them to be stronger than she was. The Hallandren are not their enemy. They are not even paying attention. If they riot, the Hallandren will start paying attention in the worst way. Give her time to bring this back to her father; the king of Idris does care, she says; she does. She promises that if they keep the slum calm she will see them written into Idris's memory of this period as heroes, not deserters. The men, one at a time, agree to try.
They leave. Vasher thanks her flatly; she tells him she did not do it for him. When she asks whether she is now his prisoner he tosses her a bag of coins, tells her to go home to Idris, and starts to walk out alone. She does not pick up the bag. She tells him, very quietly, that the worst part of being used by Denth is that some small part of her still feels he is her friend, that this must be a misunderstanding, that she should go to him and ask him what really happened. And then she remembers Parlin dead, and the agents in sacks, and is wretched. *You are not the first one Denth has taken in,* Vasher tells her. *He is a subtle one.* And he himself, by contrast, is not. He gets frustrated and snaps at people, but he promises he will not lie to her: he wants to stop this war. That is all that matters to him now.
She wants to believe him. She is afraid she is about to be taken in again. She tells him she will help — only this, only the talking. He picks up the bag of coins. There are more meetings, he warns her, but his contacts are dye-vat workers and field hands, not anyone important. *So I begin again,* she thinks, falling in behind him into the street. *I can only hope that this time, I'm on the right side.*