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Siri watches Susebron eat a third dessert on the blanket they have spread between them on the bedchamber floor. The picnic has become a nightly ritual — she performs her act for the listening priests, then they order food, and the kitchens send up an absurd spread within minutes. He has discovered, freed of priestly etiquette, that he has a sweet tooth. She warns him he will get fat. He writes back, deadpan on his board: *not for gods.* His mother, he writes, explained it. Returned always look the same; food and exercise alike slide off them. She has no counter-argument. She lies on her stomach across from him in the half-dark and tells him he is too obedient — he needs to be more reckless. He points out, drily, that it is hard to be reckless when one is locked in a palace surrounded by hundreds of servants. Good point.

Then he tells her what he has done. He hopes she will not be angry. He used his artisans' script with the priests in person — not about anything dangerous, only to ask why his father died right after fathering him. *I asked them why I was worried about having a child,* he writes. They told him not to worry, that everything would be all right, that this was something he need not concern himself with. He pressed; they brushed him off again. Since then, he writes, his guards and Awakeners have been staying particularly close. They even cancelled his last appearance at the assembly. The priests, who have never quite restricted him before, have begun to. Siri tells him it is a bad sign. She has had no luck of her own — the three storytellers she has summoned since Hoid all knew less than he did.

They lay the picture out together. Treledees spoke of Susebron's Breath hoard with the reverence one would give a sacred heirloom; the Hallandren monarchy, Susebron writes, may be nothing but a sheath for the hoard — a dynasty bred to carry Peacegiver's Breath from generation to generation. Siri points out the convenient improbability that every reigning God King always seems to father a stillborn son who Returns. Susebron's hand shakes slightly on the next sentence: *unless the next God King isn't really the son of the current one.* Somewhere in Hallandren, an infant must already have died and Returned. That is why it is so urgent that Siri conceive: they will marry her to him, take the heir she gives them as soon as she gives it, swap in the foreign Returned infant, kill Susebron, and somehow strip the hoard off him and onto the new child. She asks whether infants can even Return. Yes, he writes. They can.

She is left only with one open question, the one that has nagged her since Hoid's story: if the God Kings are just vessels for Peacegiver's Breath, why bother changing them at all? Why not leave one man holding the hoard for centuries? He does not know. Perhaps a child is easier to keep biddable; perhaps they read each new God King's temperament and decide. Susebron notes ruefully that on her own account he has been altogether too obedient. She reminds him that he hid his mother's storybook, taught himself to write, and worked his priests in person — by their measure he has been a wild man.

He leans back. There is a sadness on his face he does not need a board for. *If what you say is true,* he writes finally, *then the woman who raised me was not my mother.* He would have been born to a stranger and brought to the palace as the supposed son of a king the priests had just killed. She was the only person who had ever been kind to him; the priests had revered him and cared for him, but they had never loved him; and now, if any of this is right, he never even knew who she was. Siri crawls round the blanket and puts her arms around him. *If she raised you, she's your mother,* she tells him. He does not answer. After a moment he writes: *though it now seems suspicious to me that she would die as she did. She was one of the few who could have told me the truth.*

To turn him away from grief she asks him about her own family. She tells him about her father, Ridger, the monastery-sworn Fafen she barely knows. She tells him about Vivenna — the eldest, the one Susebron had been raised to marry. *She must hate me,* he writes. *No,* Siri says, *Vivenna doesn't know how to hate. She was always there, watching out for me.* He runs his fingers through her hair — yellow now, which she has had to learn to do consciously; people read her too easily otherwise. He stops. He writes, awkwardly: *I was wrong about one thing.* He had said his mother was the only person who had ever shown him love. That was not true. She did not have to befriend him. She did not have to teach him to read, or kiss him hello. She loved him.

He looks at her. He leans down and kisses her. A dozen objections occur to her at once and she watches every one of them get smaller as she kisses him back. He pauses, uncertain what to do next. She, who has spent every previous night in this room performing not-this for the listening priests, knows exactly what to do next. Her hair flushes deep red. The priests' listeners are about to get what they have been waiting months to hear. *I really am too hasty,* she thinks, pulling her shift off over her head. *I need to get better at controlling my impulses. Some other time.*