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Cornered with the God King and the surviving priests near the front of the palace, Siri is mid-question — *how* can the tongueless Susebron possibly give the Treasure of Peacegiver away when he cannot speak a Command? — when Treledees is cut off by a squad of Lifeless crashing in through one door, then another at the other. She drags Susebron toward a third doorway and finds Bluefingers standing on the other side of it with more Lifeless at his back.

The priests throw themselves in front of the creatures one after another — armed, unarmed, simply waving their arms — and are slaughtered. Treledees runs in last with his teeth gritted, charges a single Lifeless, and dies. The secrets of how the Treasure was meant to be transferred die unspoken with him. The Lifeless step over the bodies. Bluefingers walks around them, looks past the God King to her, and tells her *now, Vessel, I believe we were going somewhere.*

At the court gates Vivenna is turned away with the rest of a worried morning crowd. The whole capital is restless — whatever Vasher did the night before stirred things up. From the blanket on her shoulder, the sword suggests she just go around. *Vasher never asks if he can enter. He just goes in.* She slips along the rocky outer ledge of the wall, Awakens a wall tapestry — *lift me* — and rides it up onto the parapet. She is spotted at once. She has the tapestry lower her inside and runs across the lawn for the palace, the sword in her head pushing her on, naming every nearby soldier evil, asking to be drawn.

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 blade — blanket and all — onto the lawn before 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 are the stepped black blocks that give the palace its pyramid shape; above those, sheer carved stone. She jumps, her Awakened leggings tossing her up, and pulls herself onto the first block with her tassel-fingers. Arrows begin to clatter around her — her Awakened cloak catches one and drops it. Block by block she climbs to the top of the stepped section, then starts up the carved upper wall toward the window the sword showed her, refusing, for the sake of her sanity, to look down.

In the carved stone dungeon below the court, Lightsong sits in his cell, robes still dirty from the tunnel, the shallow sword cut on his thigh ignored beside the pain inside him. Blushweaver's murder, Llarimar's revelation, the betrayal of the God King's priests: too much, too fast. His Heightenings catch on the thing that has been bothering him about the men in priesthood's robes across the room. It is the colour of their faces — too small a deviation to read in any one of them, a clear pattern across all of them. These are not Hallandren at all. They are Pahn Kahl in robes. And all at once the rest of it makes sense to him: the entire court has been played for fools.

Bluefingers hauls Siri and the captive Susebron up another stairwell, hands wringing as always, into a hallway that has gone dreadfully quiet. She demands he tell her what he means to do. He answers, finally. He is Pahn Kahl. His people were rolled over in the Manywar and made workers and slaves, and when Hallandren later split with Idris, they were simply left another conqueror. *How many of my people would you sacrifice, if it meant freedom for yours?* he asks. *None,* she says. He doubts she would say so if the positions were reversed. *Your people are not innocent. They're just like the Hallandren.*

The God King suddenly punches the Lifeless beside him. He kicks at another, growls a tongueless wordless roar, waves her toward escape — and is borne to the ground by a dozen of them. A pair of false-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, they have changed it to their own. *The rest of the Lifeless are ours.* Bluefingers tells them to give the Command: *order the Lifeless to march on Idris.*

The accomplices peel away to do it. Susebron is dragged down a stairwell to be held until they need his body. Bluefingers, looking only sad, answers her last questions plainly. The men who hold the phrases — the only ones alive who can call the army off — will poison themselves once the Lifeless are gone. The corpses of Lightsong and Blushweaver will be planted in the Lifeless barracks among the dead bodies of Idrian mercenaries he hired from the slums; the God King will be left dead in the palace dungeon. Hallandren will read the night as a coordinated Idrian assassination and commit to the war. *I wish you hadn't gotten involved,* he tells her. *It would have been easier for me if you'd been able to keep yourself from getting pregnant.*

She is not, she tells him. The people *think* she is, he sighs, and that is enough. And the Idrians need to be furious enough to fight rather than flee, or they will scatter into the highlands and the war will not happen. Looking at his face she understands the rest of it without being told. A murdered queen and a murdered heir are 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 all of it.