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Moash hauls ladder-poles across the Voidbringer lumberyard in the storm-bunker suburb west of Kholinar, following Sah and Khen back and forth between the cut piles and the parshmen turning the poles into siege ladders. The arrangement is grotesquely familiar — sturdy boots, gloves, three meals, too much idle time and a wall waiting for them at the end of it. Khen has finally started to ask why, in the new world, the Fused are working their own people to death the same way the Alethi did. *We harbored a spy*, Sah says, and Moash privately notes that the spy was Kaladin Stormblessed. The new parshmen's accent keeps reminding him of bridgemen he loved.

A horned malen Fused is patiently teaching one of the parshman carpenters how to saw, dark Voidlight curling into a saw-shape across his arm. Out beyond the yard, parshman conscripts are running close-order drill. Word in camp is that Kholinar will be hit within weeks — the city has Soulcasters of its own that can feed it indefinitely, while the Voidbringer occupation cannot yet support a long siege, and so the assault will have to come fast and at scale. Moash's crew will not be trained for it; they will run at the front of the assault until the first wave is spent, and the rest of the army will go in over their bodies. Khen sees it. Sah snaps that yes, he cares; the Fused took his daughter. *Then what do we do?* she asks, very small. He does not know.

Moash does. He throws his bundle down and stalks out of the yard with his overseer scrambling behind him. He wants to talk to one of the flying-and-hovering kind of Fused — the ones who seem to be in charge — and when he cannot find one, walks up to a heavy-carapaced malen sitting by the town's cistern and demands a meeting with someone in command. The creature grins, laughs, and falls backwards into the water to float and stare at the sky. The mad ones outnumber the sane.

Before Moash can leave the town, a robed Fused drops out of the sky, presses a hand to his chest, and lifts both of them straight up into the chill air on Voidlight. The town shrinks to a model below. The Fused dumps him in midair next to a hovering woman in trailing red robes — Lady Leshwi — whose face is marbled in white, red, and black in a way Moash has rarely seen on a parshman. The Voidlight keeps him aloft, just barely; he focuses on her instead of on the drop.

She knows his name; his overseer gave it to her; she asks where he got it. From his grandfather. Curious, she says — it is one of her people's names too, and she wonders how it has drifted across the ages to wash up on a Alethi slave. She names herself sane, *as if it were the same thing* as being in command. She praises his boldness. Then she asks where he learned the Surges, because when he killed her she was Lashed and he had responded with familiarity — and she will say, without guile, that she was furious to be caught so unprepared. He realizes the marbled pattern of her skin is the same one he fought in the air over the Shattered Plains. *I killed you?* he says. She regards him unblinking, then explains: this body was offered to her in sacrifice, to bond and make her own, as she has none. He starts to drop; she catches his wrist and pours more Voidlight into him. *Are you some kind of spren?* She blinks and does not answer.

Her companions had spared him on her behalf and brought him here, in case she wanted personal vengeance once reborn. She did not. Why destroy a thing with such passion? She had watched him instead — and seen him stand up for the parshmen pulling the sledges. He asks why she treats her own people so poorly; she answers that sacrifice is how an empire is built, that those who fall in the assault will be sung of and those who survive will be honored. She presses: he was not killed for striking down a Fused, so why would he be killed for striking down one of her lesser servants? He passed two tests: passion when he fought for the slaves, and submission to authority when summoned. *Why did you protect those slaves?* Because, he says, *you need to be unified.* His own people, broken and ruined, do not deserve this land. She asks if he is not angry that they took his Shards. *They were first given to me by a man I betrayed. I don't deserve them.* The voice within him is back: *no, not you, it's not your fault.* She asks what does anger him. *Vengeance.* Kaladin had been protecting a murderer. *Yes,* she says, with a smile he can only call sinister. *I understand.* And she begins to tell him why the Fused fight.

Half an hour later, near evening, Moash walks the streets of the conquered town alone in his Bridge Four coat — Lady Leshwi has ordered him freed. He could turn west and walk toward Kholinar with the other refugees and try to defend the capital. He stops at a fence around captured horses and turns back toward the lumberyard instead. He pulls a bundle of ladder-rods from a pile — the workers there see who it is and do not stop him — and walks across to his ostracized crew. He unties the bundle and tosses one length of wood to each of them. *I can train you with those,* he says. *Sticks?* asks Khen. *Spears,* says Moash. *I can teach you to be soldiers. We'll probably die anyway. We'll probably never make it to the top of the walls. But it's something.* Khen says she will do it. Slowly, the others nod.