“I know,” she said, looking out over the city and its specks of light. “I felt you enter the building a little while ago.”
He chuckled, joining her. “I forget that you have so much Breath, Princess. You never use it.”
Except to feel when people are nearby, she thought. But I can’t help that, can I?
“I recognize that look of frustration,” Denth noted. “Still worried that the plan isn’t working fast enough?”
She shook her head. “Other things entirely, Denth.”
“Probably shouldn’t have left you alone so long with Jewels. I hope she didn’t take too many bites out of you.”
Vivenna didn’t respond. Finally, she sighed, then turned toward him. “How did the job go?”
“Perfectly,” Denth said. “By the time we hit the shop, nobody was looking. Considering the guards they put there every night, they must be feeling pretty stupid to have been robbed in broad daylight.”
“I still don’t understand what good it will do,” she said. “A spice merchant’s shop?”
“Not his shop,” Denth said. “His stores. We ruined or carted off every barrel of salt in that cellar. He’s one of only three men who store salt in any great amount; most of the other spice merchants buy from him.”
“Yes, but salt,” Vivenna said. “What’s the point?”
“How hot was it today?” Denth asked.
Vivenna shrugged. “Too hot.”
“What happens to meat when it’s hot?”
“It rots,” Vivenna said. “But they don’t have to use salt to preserve meat. They can use . . .”
“Ice?” Denth asked, chuckling. “No, not down here, Princess. You want to preserve meat, you salt it. And if you want an army to carry fish with them from the Inner Sea to attack a place as far away as Idris . . .”
Vivenna smiled.
“The thieves we worked with will ship the salt away,” Denth said. “Smuggle it to the distant kingdoms where it can be sold openly. By the time this war comes, the Crown will have some real trouble keeping its men supplied with meat. Just another small strike, but those should add up.”
“Thank you,” Vivenna said.
“Don’t thank us,” Denth said. “Just pay us.”
Vivenna nodded. They fell silent for a time, looking out over the city.
“Does Jewels really believe in the Iridescent Tones?” Vivenna finally asked.
“As passionately as Tonk Fah likes to nap,” Denth said. He eyed her. “You didn’t challenge her, did you?”
“Kind of.”
Denth whistled. “And you’re still standing? I’ll have to thank her for her restraint.”
“How can she believe?” Vivenna said.
Denth shrugged. “Seems like a good enough religion to me. I mean, you can go and see her gods. Talk to them, watch them shine. It isn’t all that tough to understand.”
“But she’s working for an Idrian,” Vivenna said. “Working to undermine her own gods’ ability to wage war. That was a priest’s carriage we knocked over today.”
“And a fairly important one, actually,” Denth said with a chuckle. “Ah, Princess. It’s a little difficult to understand. Mind-set of a mercenary. We’re paid to do things—but we’re not the ones doing them. It’s you who do these things. We’re just your tools.”
“Tools that work against the Hallandren gods.”
“That isn’t a reason to stop believing,” Denth said. “We get pretty good at separating ourselves from the things we have to do. Maybe that’s what makes people hate us so much. They can’t see that if we kill a friend on a battlefield, it doesn’t mean that we’re callous or untrustworthy. We do what we’re paid to do. Just like anyone else.”
“It’s different,” Vivenna said.
Denth shrugged. “Do you think the refiner ever considers that the iron he purifies could end up in a sword that kills a friend of his?”
Vivenna stared out over the lights of the city and all of the people they represented, with all their different beliefs, different ways of thinking, different contradictions. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who struggled to believe two seemingly opposing things at the same time.
“What about you, Denth?” she asked. “Are you Hallandren?”
“Gods, no,” he said.
“Then what do you believe?”
“Haven’t believed much,” he said. “Not in a long time.”
“What about your family?” Vivenna asked. “What did they believe?”
“Family’s all dead. They believed faiths that most everybody has forgotten by now. I never joined them.”
Vivenna frowned. “You have to believe in something. If not a religion, then somebody. A way of living.”
“I did once.”
“Do you always have to answer so vaguely?”
He glanced at her. “Yes,” he said. “Except, perhaps, for that question.”
She rolled her eyes.
He leaned against the banister. “The things I believed,” he said, “I don’t know that they’d make sense, or that you’d even hear me out if I told you about them.”
“You claim to seek money,” she said. “But you don’t. I’ve seen Lemex’s ledgers. He wasn’t paying you that much. Not as much as I’d assumed by far. And, if you’d wanted, you could have hit that priest’s carriage and taken the money. You could have stolen it twice as easily as you did the salt.”
He didn’t respond.
“You don’t serve any kingdom or king that I can figure out,” she continued. “You’re a better swordsman than any simple bodyguard—I suspect better than almost anyone, if you can impress a crime boss with your skill so easily. You could have fame, students, and prizes if you decided to become a sport duelist. You claim to obey your employer, but you give the orders more often than take them—and besides, since you don’t care about money, that whole employee thing is probably just a front.”
She paused. “In fact,” she said, “the only thing I’ve ever seen you express even a spark of emotion about is that man, Vasher. The one with the sword.”
Even as she said the name, Denth grew more tense.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He turned toward her, eyes hard, showing her—once again—that the jovial man he showed the world was a mask. A charade. A softness to cover the stone within.
“I’m a mercenary,” he said.
“All right,” she said, “then who were you?”
“You don’t want to know the answer to that,” he said. And then he left, stomping away through the door and leaving her alone on the dark wooden balcony.
26
Lightsong awoke and immediately climbed from bed. He stood up, stretched, and smiled. “Beautiful day,” he said.
His servants stood at the edges of the room, watching uncertainly.
“What?” Lightsong asked, holding out his arms. “Come on, let’s get dressed.”
They rushed forward. Llarimar entered shortly after. Lightsong often wondered how early he got up, since each morning when Lightsong rose, Llarimar was always there.
Llarimar watched him with a raised eyebrow. “You’re chipper this morning, Your Grace.”
Lightsong shrugged. “It just felt like it was time to get up.”
“A full hour earlier than usual.”
Lightsong cocked his head as the servants tied off his robes. “Really?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Fancy that,” Lightsong said, nodding to his servants as they stepped back, leaving him dressed.
“Shall we go over your dreams, then?” Llarimar asked.
Lightsong paused, an image flashing in his head. Rain. Tempest. Storms. And a brilliant red panther.
“Nope,” Lightsong said, walking toward the doorway.
“Your Grace . . .”
“We’ll talk about the dreams another time, Scoot,” Lightsong said. “We have more important work.”
“More important work?”
Lightsong smiled, reaching the doorway and turning back. “I want to go back to Mercystar’s palace.”
“What ever for?”
“I don’t know,” Lightsong said happily.
Llarimar sighed. “Very well, Your Grace. But can we at least look over some art, first? There are people who paid good money to get your opinion, and some are waiting quite eagerly to hear what you think of their pieces.”
“All right,” Lightsong said. “But let’s be quick about it.”
* * *
LIGHTSONG STARED AT THE PAINTING.
Red upon red, shades so subtle that the painter must have been of the First Heightening at least. Violent, terrible reds, clashing against one another like waves—waves that only vaguely resembled men, yet that somehow managed to convey the idea of armies fighting much better than any detailed realistic depiction could have.
Chaos. Bloody wounds upon bloody uniforms upon bloody skin. There was so much violence in red. His own color. He almost felt as if he were in the painting—felt its turmoil shaking him, disorienting him, pulling on him.
The waves of men pointed toward one figure at the center. A woman, vaguely depicted by a couple of curved brushstrokes. And yet it was obvious. She stood high, as if atop a cresting wave of crashing soldiers, caught in mid-motion, head flung back, her arm upraised.
Holding a deep black sword that darkened the red sky around it.
“The Battle of Twilight Falls,” Llarimar said quietly, standing beside him in the white hallway. “Last conflict of the Manywar.”
Lightsong nodded. He’d known that, somehow. The faces of many of the soldiers were tinged with grey. They were Lifeless. The Manywar had been the first time they had been used in large numbers on the battlefield.
“I know you don’t prefer war scenes,” Llarimar said. “But—”
“I like it,” Lightsong said, cutting off the priest. “I like it a lot.”
Llarimar fell silent.
Lightsong stared into the painting with its flowing reds, painted so subtly that they gave a feeling of war, rather than just an image. “It might be the best painting that has ever passed through my hall.”
The priests on the other side of the room began writing furiously. Llarimar just stared at him, troubled.
“What?” Lightsong asked.
“It’s nothing,” Llarimar said.
“Scoot . . .” Lightsong said, eyeing him.
The priest sighed. “I can’t speak, Your Grace. I cannot taint your impression of the paintings.”
“A lot of gods have been giving favorable reviews of war paintings lately, eh?” Lightsong said, looking back at the artwork.
Llarimar didn’t answer.
“It’s probably nothing,” Lightsong said. “Just our response to those arguments in the court, I’d guess.”
“Likely,” Llarimar said.
Lightsong fell silent. He knew it wasn’t “nothing” to Llarimar. To him, Lightsong wasn’t just giving his impression of art—he was foretelling the future. What did it augur that he liked a depiction of war with such vibrant, brutal colorings? Was it a reaction to his dreams? But last night, he hadn’t dreamed of a war. Finally. He’d dreamed of a storm, true, but that wasn’t the same thing.