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easier ways to deal with Siri—ways that didn’t include sending her to represent Idris in a foreign court. Why, then? Did he really think she’d do a good job? That gave her pause. Then she considered how ridiculous it was. Her father wouldn’t have assumed that she’d do a better job than Vivenna. Nobody did
anything
better than Vivenna.
    Siri sighed, feeling her hair turn a pensive brown. At least the landscape was interesting, and in order to keep herself from feeling any more frustrated, she let it distract her for the moment. Hallandren was in the lowlands, a place of tropical forests and strange, colorful animals. Siri had heard the descriptions from ramblemen, and even confirmed their accounts in the occasional book she’d been forced to read. She’d thought she knew what to expect. Yet as the hills gave way to deep grasslands and then the trees finally began to crowd the road, Siri began to realize that there was something no tome or tale could adequately describe.
    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