Warbreaker (Warbreaker #1)(90)

Yet what had prompted him to defy that learning and ask her to teach him? Why was he willing to keep his learning secret from the men he had been taught all his life to obey and trust? He was not quite so innocent as he appeared.

“These stories,” she said. “Your desire to treat people well. Is that what kept you from . . . taking me on any of those nights when I first came into the room?”

From taking you? I do not understand.

Siri blushed, hair turning red to match. “I mean, why did you just sit there?”

Because I did not know what else to do, he said. I knew that we need to have a child. So I sat and waited for it to happen. We must be doing something wrong, for no child has come.

Siri paused, then blinked. He couldn’t possibly . . . “You don’t know how to have children?”

In the stories, he wrote, a man and a woman spend the night together. Then they have a child. We spent many nights together, and there were no children.

“And nobody—none of your priests—explained the process to you?”

No. What process do you mean?

She sat for a moment. No, she thought, feeling her blush deepen. I am not going to have that conversation with him. “I think we’ll talk about it another time.”

It was a very strange experiance when you came into the room that first night, he wrote. I must admit, I was very scared of you.

Siri smiled as she remembered her own terror. It hadn’t even occurred to her that he would be frightened. Why would it have? He was the God King.

“So,” she said, tapping the bedspread with one finger, “you were never taken to other women?”

No, he wrote. I did find it very interesting to see you naked.

She flushed again, though her hair had apparently decided to just stay red. “That’s not what we’re talking about right now,” she said. “I want to know about other women. No mistresses? No concubines?”

No.

“They really are scared of you having a child.”

Why say that? he wrote. They sent you to me.

“Only after fifty years of rule,” she said. “And only under very controlled circumstances, with the proper lineage to produce a child with the right bloodline. Bluefingers thinks that child might be a danger to us.”

I do not understand why, he wrote. This is what everyone wants. There must be an heir.

“Why?” Siri said. “You still look like you’re barely two decades old. Your aging is slowed by your BioChroma.”

Without an heir, the kingdom is in danger. Should I be killed, there will be nobody to rule.

“And that wasn’t a danger for the last fifty years?”

He paused, frowning, then slowly erased his board.

“They must think that you’re in danger now,” she said slowly. “But not from sickness—even I know that Returned don’t suffer from diseases. In fact, do they even age at all?”

I don’t think so, the God King wrote.

“How did the previous God Kings die?”

There have been only four, he wrote. I do not know how they died for certain.

“Only four kings in several hundred years, all dead of mysterious circumstances. . . .”

My father died before I was old enough to remember him, Susebron wrote. I was told he gave his life for the kingdom—that he released his BioChromatic Breath, as all Returned can, to cure a terrible disease. The other Returned can only cure one person. A God King, however, can cure many. That is what I was told.

“There must be a record of that then,” she said. “Somewhere in those books the priests have guarded so tightly.”

I am sorry that they would not let you read them, he wrote.

She waved an indifferent hand. “There wasn’t much chance of it working. I’ll need to find another way to get at those histories.” Having a child is the danger, she thought. That’s what Bluefingers said. So whatever threat there is to my life, it will only come after there is an heir. Bluefingers mentioned a threat to the God King too. That almost makes it sound like the danger comes from the priests themselves. Why would they want to harm their own god?

She glanced at Susebron, who was flipping intently through his book of stories. She smiled at the look of concentration on his face as he deciphered the text.

Well, she thought, considering what he knows of sex, I’d say that we don’t have to worry much about having a child in the near future.

Of course, she was also worried that the lack of a child would prove just as dangerous as the presence of one.

25

Vivenna went among the people of T’Telir and couldn’t help feeling that every one of them recognized her.

She fought the feeling down. It was actually a miracle that Thame—who came from her own home city—had been able to pick her out. The people around her would have no way of connecting Vivenna to the rumors they might have heard, especially considering her clothing.

Immodest reds and yellows layered one atop the other on her dress. The garment had been the only one that Parlin and Tonk Fah had been able to find that met her stringent requirements for modesty. The tubelike dress was made after a foreign cut, from Tedradel, across the Inner Sea. It came down almost to her ankles, and though its snugness emphasized her bust, at least the garment covered her almost up to the neck, and had full-length sleeves.