POV: vivenna
Summary
Vasher hangs at the rented-room window on an Awakened rope wrapped about his waist, watching Vivenna practise. She has not seen him: he has stored his Breath in his shirt and is a Drab, invisible to her life sense. Inside, she Commands a ribbon to wiggle across the floor, wrap a cup, and carry it back to her without spilling — a long compound Command, of the sort he had told her was too complicated to learn yet. She gets the wrap wrong, soaks the floor, curses, and tries again. He thinks she is learning faster than she should. He climbs in. She hides the ribbon hastily. He reports that Denth's old houses are empty — Denth is too clever to have stayed in places she could give up — and he has been wasting weeks chasing him in fits and pieces.
Vivenna presses him on whether they are really making any difference: he ranges among slum cellars and orchard fields while Denth moves freely in the court. He admits she is right. He has tried priests — and even there has lost ground. Nanrovah of all people had been arguing against the war, met him several times, then refused to see him and reversed his position. *Nanrovah,* Vivenna repeats. She remembers. The day Tonk Fah tipped a carriage in the merchant garden during a salt-peddler burglary, that carriage had been Nanrovah's — the burglary itself, she suddenly sees, was the distraction; the real target was the carriage. Vasher curses and goes out alone.
He comes back hours after dark in different clothes. Off come the rags; on goes a tunic with the sleeves cut into tassels at the wrist and trousers with extra strips at the cuff, and Commands she has never heard him give before. *Upon call become my fingers and grip that which I must.* *Become as my legs and give them strength.* Then his ragged cloak, with the simpler *protect me.* He takes a thin rope belt and Nightblood from the closet. They are going to lift one of the thieves and find out what Denth wanted from that carriage. He warns her that if a fight starts, he will not defend her; he tells her to put her Breath into her shirt with a non-active Command and to wear the dueling sword he bought her, more for show than use. She does. The world dulls; the First Heightening she had only just recovered is gone again.
He leads her through a slum she had been afraid to walk through even when she was on the street. They stop at a low, flat-topped building half-set into a hollow with shanties up the slope behind. He silences the two guards quietly. He has her wait while he searches the back of the building, then — when his groping turns up nothing — pulls a handful of straw from his pocket, twists three little men out of it with thread, and gives each one the same Command: *find tunnels.* They scuttle on the dirt. One bounces up, the others bounce over to it, and Vasher finds and disarms the trapped trapdoor beneath. Vivenna watches him recover the Breath from each straw man with a quiet *thank you* and files the strangeness away. She files away the lesson, too: he can do far more abstract Awakening than he has admitted to her, and the size of the discrepancy is about practice and mental image, not words.
The cellar below holds a hearthfire and several men drinking and laughing. Vasher slips across and into a second tunnel-nook off to one side. Vivenna follows. The nook ends in a small cage; in the cage is a child. The kidnapping snaps into place at once: the carriage had been hit not for its coins but for Nanrovah's daughter, the perfect lever to flip his vote. The thieves notice them. Vasher turns from the cage to fight. His sleeve-tassels seize one man's blade; his cloak whips out without his hand on it and grabs another from behind; sheathed Nightblood crushes ribs and legs. Something turns over in him as the screams continue. He stops looking like a fighter and starts looking like a man enraged. His arm trembles on the sword's hilt; black smoke spills from the sheath toward both floor and ceiling at once; a voice slides into Vivenna's head and urges her, too, to draw it and feed it the men on the floor. She fumbles at the cage. The lock is metal; her thread Commanded *unlock things* gets nothing — Breath will not stick to anything that was never alive. She tries again with *twist things*, feeds the thread into the keyhole, and the door opens. The fighting has stopped. She calls his name and tells him the child will not come to her, and Vasher blinks, sees her, and snaps the sword home.
He kneels at the cage. The child who would not let Vivenna touch her climbs straight into his arms and weeps. Vivenna asks how. He has never met the girl. He carries her up through the trapdoor and out across T'Telir toward the rich quarter. Before they reach the gates he stops on the street, sets her down, and asks her to repeat some words back to him; Vivenna, watching from a distance with her Breath briefly back in hand, swears she sees the child's aura flicker — faintly, but flicker. Denth had told her Breath could only be given all at once; that, like other things he said, looks like a lie.
They reach Nanrovah's mansion. Vasher kicks the gate open. Two guard dogs charge and then, the instant they see him, calm and trail him licking his free hand. Nanrovah himself stumbles out in a white nightgown, takes his daughter from Vasher's arms, and confesses that he had been forced to change his arguments under threat of her death. Vasher gives him no thanks back. The men who took her, he says, have been dealt with; what Nanrovah owes him in return is to keep the kingdom from turning its Lifeless into a massacre. He turns and walks out into the street.
Vivenna catches him up. He tells her, in the dark on the road, that she has redeemed herself. The kidnapping was something Denth would have done in any case; without her noticing the carriage clue he would never have found the child. She saved that girl's life. He apologises for losing his temper in the cellar — a warrior, he says, ought to be calm. He has never been one. She makes a sharp remark about the priest's mansion. He stops her: Nanrovah is the son of one of the city's wealthiest merchants and serves Stillmark without pay; priests, he points out, are easy people to despise wrong. She judges him this time by what she has seen him do — kneel by a cage in tears, return the child to her father, walk away with only a plea for peace as payment — and decides that he is rough, brutal, foul-tempered, and a good man. Beside him in the dark, she feels safe for the first time in weeks.