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TenSoon sits naked in a cage of iron plates and hard steel bars in the great cavern of the Homeland, with wire mesh stretched across all four faces so he cannot dissolve to muscle and slip out. The cage is itself an insult — no kandra in history has ever needed one — and so is the long delay between his trial in the Trustwarren and his sentencing. The Seconds have set him up as a public exhibit, the way humans put a man in stocks, so that the kandra people can come and stare at the one who broke Contract and shamed his species. His name, he understands, will be a byword for centuries.

He wonders if anything he said in the Trustwarren reached his people. *But we will not last centuries,* he thinks angrily, *that was what my speech was all about.* He had given it badly. He had no way to explain that the kandra traditions had been built for a stable world and that the world had stopped being stable. What had happened above? Had Vin reached the Well of Ascension? The gods of the kandra were at war again, and the only people on the planet who even knew it had names were pretending nothing was happening.

Beyond the bars the Homeland goes about its life under the cultivated mosses. He watches Elevenths — barely sentient new kandra, glistening blobs around a few bones — being trained in the slow business of forming muscle, which the change from mistwraith to kandra always demands. Adult kandra stew algae and fungi in stone pits not unlike the cage he sits in. The caverns are vast — far too big for the kandra to fill, which is precisely what most of them like about the place, after a Contract spent inside a master's house for decades at a time. *Solitude,* TenSoon thinks. *I will have plenty of that.*

The visitors sort themselves the way he knows they will. Fourths and Fifths come to spit at the floor before his cage in performative loyalty to the Seconds. Sixths and Sevenths — those who fill the Contracts and have known the world — come to pity him quietly. Eighths and Ninths come out of pure curiosity, that anyone as old as him could be brought to this. Then he sees a familiar face in the crowd and turns away ashamed as MeLaan makes her way to the bars in her spindly wooden-boned True Body.

She whispers his name. He tells her to go. She tells him she will not — that the Seconds have no right to do this; he is nearly as old as they are and far more wise. He answers that they are the Second Generation and chosen by the First and that the kandra follow order, that they are *of Preservation*, that they are not humans rebelling and overturning at every grievance. She presses her thin face up against his bars and asks: above? He repeats that the First Generation will do something. *They are old,* she says. *Old, forgetful, impotent.* And she tells him: it is true. Ash cloaks the land in black. The mists kill by day. Crops are dying. Men march. Ruin has returned.

TenSoon is quiet. *You have changed much,* he tells her. She smiles. The First, she says, should never have given a generation of new kandra to be raised by a Third — there are many younger kandra who would fight, who will not let the Seconds rule forever. How can she help him? He does not tell her what he is thinking — that there will of course be a Fourth- or Fifth-Generation kandra standing somewhere in the cavern listening for exactly this conversation through the Blessing of Awareness. The Seconds are lazy but they are old and crafty, and he knows every one of them well.

She asks, in a lower whisper, whether it is true: that OreSeur had carried the Blessing of Potency, that TenSoon inherited it when he killed him, that the Seconds did not find it on his body. Where had he hidden it? Could she fetch it? Bring it to him so he could fight? He answers, finally, that he will not fight his own people. He is kandra. He broke Contract. She tells him it was for a higher good. *At least I have convinced her,* he thinks. She accuses him of having been broken — first by Zane, the last master he served, then by Vin who put him in a dog's body and made him a year of humiliation in it.

He almost answers in earnest — and stops himself. He is not here to lead a kandra revolution; he is here to explain what he has discovered, accept his punishment, and be the best kandra he knows how to be. And yet. There is a slim chance. He does not even know if he wants to escape. So he speaks the way he has spent his life learning to speak: in two voices at once, with the listening Awareness in mind. He asks MeLaan whether she knows where his dog's bones are kept. She frowns. Why would he want such a disgrace? He doesn't, he tells her loudly — they shamed him; he had to come back in them because he had no other corpse to use; he would discard them gladly. He is avoiding the real issue, she tells him. There is no real issue, he answers, turning away from her so that the Seconds cannot punish her for the conversation. Please, if she truly wishes to help him, let him alone.

She hisses softly that he was once the greatest of them, and leaves. *No, MeLaan,* he thinks as she goes. *I was never great. Until recently I was the most orthodox of my generation, a conservative distinguished only by my hatred of humans. Now I am the greatest criminal in the history of our people, and I did it mostly by accident.* That is not greatness. That is just foolishness.