POV: siri
Summary
Cornered with the God King and a thin company of surviving priests and soldiers in a chamber near the front of the palace, Siri hears the bloodied report that the insurgents have engaged each other at the front gates — there is a window to break out into the city, where the people will rally around their God King. Treledees turns to her and says she needs to know something. He hesitates: she is not a priest, but if she survives and they do not, the truths the priesthood has guarded for generations cannot be allowed to die.
Returned cannot sire children. The royal line is, by the priesthood's reckoning, a fabrication — although the priest insists what people *believe* is what matters. The succession is not biological. When an infant Returns, the sitting God King invests the Treasure of Peacegiver — fifty thousand Breaths — into the new child, and then is permitted to live the rest of his life in peace. He can survive on his single innate weekly Breath like any other Returned; any god of the pantheon could, in principle, do the same with stockpiled Breath. The priesthood has simply chosen never to encourage them to discover it. Siri presses him: *how* can Susebron possibly give the Treasure away when he cannot speak a Command? *I—*, Treledees begins, and is cut off by a squad of Lifeless bursting in one door, then another at the other.
Vivenna is at the court gates, turned away with the rest of a confused morning crowd. The sword, in its blanket on her shoulder, suggests she just go around — *Vasher never asks if he can enter. He just goes in.* She slips along the rocky ledge outside the wall, Awakens a wall tapestry, *lift me*, and rides it up onto the parapet. She is seen at once. She has the tapestry lower her down inside and takes off across the lawn for the palace. The front doors are held by a heavy line of armed men in no uniform. She makes herself unsneakable in the only way that will work: she throws the sword — blanket and all — onto the lawn in front of them. To a man they freeze. One picks it up. The rest begin to fight. She runs past them and around the corner of the building.
The lower walls of the palace are the great stepped black blocks that give it its pyramid shape; above those, sheer walls with decorative carving. She jumps, her Awakened leggings tossing her up, her tassel-fingers gripping the first block, and pulls herself up. Block by block, with arrows beginning to clatter around her — one catches in her Awakened cloak and falls — she gets to the top of the stepped section and starts up the carved upper wall toward the window the sword showed her. She decides, for the sake of her sanity, not to look down.
In the carved stone dungeon below the court, Lightsong sits in his cage, Blushweaver's blood still drying in the cracks of the stone in front of him, and lets his mind catch on the thing that has been bothering him about the priests across the room. It is their *colour* — not their robes, but the colour of their faces. In any one man the deviation from the Hallandren hue would be too small to notice; in a group of them, to a man at his Heightenings, it is a pattern. These are not Hallandren priests at all. They are Pahn Kahl in God King's priesthood robes. And in the same moment all of it makes sense to him at once: the entire court has been played for fools.
Bluefingers is hauling Siri and a captive Susebron up another stairwell, hands wringing as always. She demands he talk to her. He does — finally — answer. He is Pahn Kahl; his people were in this land before the conquerors came, and were rolled over and made workers and slaves in the Manywar, before Hallandren split with Idris and left them another conqueror to live under. *How many of my people would you sacrifice, if it meant freedom for yours?* he asks. She tells him, *none*. He tells her he doubts she would say that if their positions were reversed.
The God King suddenly punches the Lifeless beside him. He kicks at another, growls a wordless roar, waves Siri to flee. She does not. He is dragged to the ground by a dozen of them as a pair of fake-priest Pahn Kahl come down the stairwell ahead with lanterns to confirm to Bluefingers that they hold Lightsong's Command phrase — they have tested it, it works, and they have changed it to their own. *The rest of the Lifeless are ours.* Bluefingers nods, looking tired, and tells them to give the Command: *order the Lifeless to march on Idris.*
He answers her last questions plainly. The men who hold the phrases — his accomplices, the only ones alive who can call the army off — will poison themselves once the Lifeless are gone. There will be no one left to stop them. The corpses of Lightsong and Blushweaver will be laid out in the Lifeless barracks among the dead bodies of Idrian mercenaries he hired from the Idrian slums. The God King will be left dead in the palace dungeons. Hallandren will read the night as a coordinated Idrian assassination and the entire kingdom will commit to the war for him. Treledees and his fellow priests have already been slaughtered, and the secrets of how Susebron was supposed to give the Treasure away have died with them.
*I wish you hadn't gotten involved in all of this,* Bluefingers tells her as her Lifeless captors drag her toward the stairwell. *It would have been easier for me if you'd been able to keep yourself from getting pregnant.* She tells him she is not. He sighs that the people *think* she is, and that is enough — and that the Idrians need to be furious enough to fight, not flee, for any of this to work. Looking at his face she understands the rest of it without needing to be told. He intends to kill her too: a murdered queen and a murdered heir is the final atrocity that turns Idris from refugee flight into a generational war of hatred. And while Hallandren and Idris bleed each other for decades, no one will ever look south at the quiet province that started it all.