Warbreaker (Warbreaker #1)(10)

Colors.

In the highlands, flower patches were rare and unconnected, as if they understood how poorly they fit with Idris philosophy. Here, they appeared to be everywhere. Tiny flowers grew in great blanketing swaths on the ground. Large, drooping pink blossoms hung from trees, like bundles of grapes, flowers growing practically on top of one another in a large cluster. Even the weeds had flowers. Siri would have picked some of them, if not for the way that the soldiers regarded them with hostility.

If I feel this anxious, she realized, those guards must feel more so. She wasn’t the only one who had been sent away from family and friends. When would these men be allowed to return? Suddenly, she felt even more guilty for subjecting the young soldier to her outburst.

I’ll send them back when I arrive, she thought. Then she immediately felt her hair grow white. Sending the men back would leave her alone in a city filled with Lifeless, Awakeners, and pagans.

Yet what good would twenty soldiers do her? Better that someone, at least, be allowed to return home.
* * *

“ONE WOULD THINK that you would be happy,” Fafen said. “After all, you no longer have to marry a tyrant.”

Vivenna plopped a bruise-colored berry into her basket, then moved on to a different bush. Fafen worked on one nearby. She wore the white robes of a monk, her hair completely shorn. Fafen was the middle sister in almost every way—midway between Siri and Vivenna in height, less proper than Vivenna, yet hardly as careless as Siri. Fafen was a bit curvier than either of them, which had caught the eyes of several young men in the village. However, the fact that they would have to become monks themselves if they wanted to marry her kept them in check. If Fafen noticed how popular she was, she’d never shown it. She’d made the decision to become a monk before her tenth birthday, and her father had wholeheartedly approved. Every noble or rich family was traditionally obligated to provide one person to the monasteries. It was against the Five Visions to be selfish, even with one’s own blood.

The two sisters gathered berries that Fafen would later distribute to those in need. The monk’s fingers were dyed slightly purple by the work. Vivenna wore gloves. That much color on her hands would be unseemly.

“Yes,” Fafen said, “I do think you’re taking this all wrong. Why, you act as if you want to go down and be married to that Lifeless monster.”

“He’s not Lifeless,” Vivenna said. “Susebron is Returned, and there is a large difference.”

“Yes, but he’s a false god. Besides, everyone knows what a terrible creature he is.”

“But it was my place to go and marry him. That is who I am, Fafen. Without it, I am nothing.”

“Nonsense,” Fafen said. “You’ll inherit now, instead of Ridger.”

Thereby unsettling the order of things even further, Vivenna thought. What right do I have to take his place from him?

She allowed this aspect of the conversation to lapse, however. She’d been arguing the point for several minutes now, and it wouldn’t be proper to continue. Proper. Rarely before had Vivenna felt so frustrated at having to be proper. Her emotions were growing rather . . . inconvenient.

“What of Siri?” she found herself saying. “You’re happy that this happened to her?”

Fafen looked up, then frowned a little to herself. She had a tendency to avoid thinking things through unless she was confronted with them directly. Vivenna felt a little ashamed for making such a blunt comment, but with Fafen, there often wasn’t any other way.

“You do have a point,” Fafen said. “I don’t see why anyone had to be sent.”

“The treaty,” Vivenna said. “It protects our people.”

“Austre protects our people,” Fafen said, moving on to another bush.

Will he protect Siri? Vivenna thought. Poor, innocent, capricious Siri. She’d never learned to control herself; she’d be eaten alive in the Hallandren Court of Gods. Siri wouldn’t understand the politics, the backstabbing, the false faces and lies. She would also be forced to bear the next God King of Hallandren. Performing that duty was not something Vivenna had looked forward to. It would have been a sacrifice, yet it would have been her sacrifice, given willingly for the safety of her people.

Such thoughts continued to pester Vivenna as she and Fafen finished with the berry picking, then moved down the hillside back toward the village. Fafen, like all monks, dedicated all of her work to the good of the people. She watched flocks, harvested food, and cleaned houses for those who could not do it themselves.

Without a duty of her own, Vivenna had little purpose. And yet, as she considered it, there was someone who still needed her. Someone who had left a week before, teary-eyed and frightened, looking to her big sister with desperation.

Vivenna wasn’t needed in Idris, whatever her father said. She was useless here. But she did know the people, cultures, and society of Hallandren. And—as she followed Fafen onto the village road—an idea began to form in Vivenna’s head.

One that was not, by any stretch of the imagination, proper.

3

Lightsong didn’t remember dying.

His priests, however, assured him that his death had been extremely inspiring. Noble. Grand. Heroic. One did not Return unless one died in a way that exemplified the great virtues of human existence. That was why the Iridescent Tones sent the Returned back; they acted as examples, and gods, to the people who still lived.