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Nomad watches the ornate ship park in the air alone over the crash site and decides he has been issued an invitation. Rebeke asks why the Cinder King would come on his own, and the answer is plainly that he has come for him. Aux protests trepidatiously that this looks stupid; Nomad concedes that yes, it is, but he cannot stop moving. He tells Rebeke to keep her head down and to back him up if he comes back through a window of his own choice, or otherwise. Then he fires up the cycle and climbs to the flagship's bow.

The Cinder King is waiting in coat and gloves, embers in his eyes mirrored by the ember in his chest. A white-jacketed servant carries a stack of cardboards painted with handshakes and pointed fingers — pictogram diplomacy for the offworlder who shouldn't speak the language. Nomad waves them off and says in plain local tongue that he has figured it out. The king is visibly thrown by the speed of it, then recovers; he gestures Nomad inside with a promise of no tricks. Nomad accepts the promise out loud and lets him hear that an oath given to a Rosharan is not the kind of contract he might think.

Inside the parlour, the king pours liquor from a real bar — and Nomad, whose body laughs at most poisons, has half a drink and finds it the best he has met in some time. The king walks him through his self-history. He killed the first offworlder to land on his planet — a heavyset Thaylen with long eyebrows — out of fear that the man was something demonic, and inherited from the body a translation device and a stack of books. The device lasted long enough to render the books into the local tongue before it gave out. One of them was a Silverlight survey volume, a sentence on each of a hundred worlds; the king lifts it from the shelf and shows Nomad the page on Roshar. Tall. Distinctive features. Warlike. Dangerous. He has expected, on this basis, that Nomad will appreciate what he is building here. He always felt destined for more than running circles around the sun. He was meant, he says, to unite his people.

Nomad laughs at him. He has heard this exact sentence from too many tyrants on too many worlds; in his early life he was passed between such men like coinage. The king's good humour curdles. He produces a barely-lit cylinder from his cabinet and tells Nomad it is what is left of his kinsman — and that Rosharans make poor sunhearts. Nomad replies that the man was probably carrying Breath, that he was no kinsman, that he came from a different country entirely; then offers, mildly, that conquest only erases lines on a map and that unity requires something else.

To prove a different point the king crosses the room, takes one of his own Charred by the throat and squeezes until the man is on his knees and gasping. This, he says, is true power: not the ability to kill, but the ability to command the killers. Before he rose to his present station he was the man who marched prisoners to their fate, and that is where he learned the lesson. Aux, drily, agrees that this is a perfectly reasonable and well-adjusted thing to say. Nomad has met this man before in other uniforms: every guard who ever liked the feeling of pushing a stronger person around. He has the rare comfort of knowing that running this one through with a hot poker would cost him no sleep.

Asked what he wants, Nomad answers, plainly, to stay ahead of those hunting him. The king offers, with a straight face, to protect him. Nomad nearly chokes laughing — he has, he says, written authorisation from his master to laugh at kings — and then an aide whispers something to the king, and a moment later two more drag Rebeke up the deck, gagged, her hair loose. Nomad sets the shot glass down hard; the king misreads the gesture as intimidation and draws his pistol on her instead. The aide keeps whispering — Nomad catches the words "entire city" and "prospectors" — and watches the king's eyes flicker to the safe on the wall where he likely keeps his key. He is putting the swap together in real time. Damnation.

Nomad steps forward, into the king's line on Rebeke, and tells him this is not compassion and it is not ruthlessness either. He really did only want to get away. But the king broke an oath, and one should never break an oath to a Rosharan. He lunges; Auxiliary forms in his hand as a thrown sphere; the pistol fires; the sphere and the bullet meet in the air in a burst of sparks.