POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna sits alone in a tiny rented chamber on the edge of a T'Telir neighbourhood, choking down dried squid she has not yet realised is squid, washing the taste away with warm water. Vasher has paid for the room by the day; he has stepped out. She is too exhausted to sleep. For five days now they have been working — group after group of Idrian dockmen, dye workers, field hands, met in cellars and back rooms. He sets the schedule and expects her to keep up, and she has. The work feels honest in a way her time with Denth never did. She still has to remind herself that the mercenary was fooling her from the first hour, because some traitor part of her does not want to.
She tries, sitting on the floor in the cramped room, to put a name to who she actually is now. Not Vivenna the confident princess; that woman died in Lemex's cellar with Parlin. Not the waif she pretended to be in the slums either — to claim that life would be a parody of the people she had hidden among. Not even the kneeling penitent she has been playing for the Idrian communities, because that too is partly a tool. What is left under the costumes is a streak she does not love about herself: she would do anything not to be helpless. That is what drove the tutors and the language lessons, and that, she admits, is what makes her want to learn to Awaken. Arrogant or not, she wants to be capable. She has been ignorant once.
She goes out to a tree near the room and practises with the rope Vasher first used to tie her up. She has retrieved its Breath. *Hold things,* she Commands, lets out a little Breath — and immediately learns that vague Commands have grotesque results: the rope wraps the branch and her own hand at once. *Your Breath to mine* recalls it. *Hold that branch* is cleaner but bleeds more colour out of her trousers. She tries to invent a conditional Command — *hold things that I tell you to hold,* *hold that branch when I tell you* — and gets nothing. A voice behind her supplies the form she could not find: *hold when thrown*. She turns; Vasher is standing there with Nightblood point-down and a pack on his shoulder. She tries the Command; the rope hangs limp; she tosses it into the branches and it locks them together so high she cannot reach. He hooks them down with the sword's crossguard and tells her, mildly, that he prefers a long rope kept always in hand — leaving Breath locked in something thrown is dangerous and wasteful. She has, he points out, made a spectacle: a young woman in head-to-toe grey clothing in T'Telir is not unobtrusive.
Back in the room he settles against the door with closed eyes and asks why an Idrian is so eager to learn the gift her religion rejects. She tells him she is not a very good Idrian any more. He grunts. *Wasn't always rejected,* he says. *Wasn't like that before the Manywar.* She files it away with the other things he says with that same too-certain voice. She asks him to teach her.
He thinks for a long time, then begins, and grows surprisingly conversational. There are four kinds of BioChromatic entity. The first is the Returned — the only naturally occurring one, the only kind that recovers sentience, the only one whose Breath cannot be willingly used or given. The second is the Lifeless — cheap, deceased hosts that drink colour from their own bodies and whose Breath sticks to them past recovery. The third is the ordinary Awakened object, like the rope: hosts far removed from a living shape, expensive to invest but recoverable. He sets out the underlying rules — the Law of BioChromatic Parallelism (the closer a host to a living shape, the cheaper to Awaken) and the Law of Comparability (cost to Awaken doesn't determine power once Awakened; Awakening is forcing a door, not filling a vessel). He warns her that the field is still young, that no one really knows why Commands have to be spoken in the Awakener's native tongue or why Lifeless are dull while Returned are not, and that countless useful Commands die unshared with the Awakeners who discovered them. He likes the topic. She watches the ragged, half-shaven mercenary turn into a scholar in front of her, and remembers what he carries leaning against the wall.
Sentience plus deceased human host. No sentience plus deceased host. No sentience plus far-from-living host. She walks the pattern in her head — and asks what a Type Four would be. An Awakened object with sentience, like a Returned inside something that was never a person. He stands. *We've covered enough for one day. And I advise you never to ask it again. Understand?* The harshness in his voice frightens her. She glances at the black sword against the wall, and her growing suspicion takes a clearer shape. He pulls something from his pack — a cloth-wrapped, well-polished dueling blade — and tells her to learn to use it, because an armed Vivenna will be less work for him to drag out of trouble than an unarmed one. She picks it up. He tells her there is another group waiting; they need to go.