Warbreaker

Chapter 46

Vivenna choked down her meal. The dried meat tasted strongly of fish, but she had learned that by breathing through her mouth, she could ignore much of the flavor. She ate every bite, then washed the taste away with a few mouthfuls of warm boiled water.

She was alone in the room. It was a small chamber built onto the side of a building near the slums. Vasher had paid a few coins for a day in it, though he wasn’t there at the moment. He’d rushed off to deal with something.

She leaned back, food consumed, closing her eyes. She’d reached the point where she was so exhausted that she actually found it difficult to sleep. The fact that the room was so small didn’t help. She couldn’t even stretch out all the way.

Vasher hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said that their work would be rigorous. Stop after stop, she spoke with the Idrians, consoling them, begging them not to push Hallandren to war. There were no restaurants as there had been with Denth. No dinners with men in fine clothing and guards. Just group after group of tired, working-class men and women. Many of them weren’t rebellious and a large number of them didn’t even live in the slums. But they were part of the Idrian community in T’Telir, and they could influence how their friends and family felt.

She liked them. Empathized with them. She felt far better about her new efforts than she had about her work with Denth, and so far as she could tell, Vasher was being honest with her. She had decided to trust those instincts. That was her decision, and that decision meant helping Vasher, for now.

Vasher didn’t ask her if she wanted to continue. He simply led her from location to location, expecting her to keep up. And so she did, meeting with the people and begging their forgiveness, despite how emotionally draining it was. She wasn’t certain if she could repair what she had done, but she was willing to try. This determination seemed to gain her some respect from Vasher. It was much more reluctantly given than Denth’s respect had been.

Denth was fooling me the entire time. It was still hard to remember that fact. Part of her didn’t want to. She leaned forward, staring at the bland wall in front of her in the boxlike room. She shivered. It was a good thing that she’d been working herself so hard lately. It kept her from thinking about things.

Discomforting things.

Who was she? How did she define herself now that everything she’d been, and everything she’d tried, had collapsed around her? She couldn’t be Vivenna the confident princess anymore. That person was dead, left behind in that cellar with Parlin’s bloody corpse. Her confidence had come from naïveté.

Now she knew how easily she had been played. She knew the cost of ignorance, and she had glimpsed the grim truths of real poverty.

Yet, she also couldn’t be that woman—the waif of the streets, the thief, the beaten-down wretch. That wasn’t her. She felt as if those weeks had been a dream, brought on by the stress of isolation and trauma of her betrayal, fueled by becoming a Drab and being suffocated by disease. To pretend that was the real her would be to parody those who truly lived on the streets. The people she’d hidden among and tried to imitate.

Where did that leave her? Was she the penitent, quiet princess who knelt with bowed head, pleading with the peasants? This, too, was partially an act. She really did feel sorry. However, she was using her stripped pride as a tool. That wasn’t her.

Who was she?

She stood up, feeling cramped in the tiny room, and pushed open the door. The neighborhood outside wasn’t quite a slum, but it wasn’t rich either. It was simply a place where people lived. There were enough colors along to street to be welcoming, but the buildings were small and held a number of families each.