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Wit leads her to a low, squat tavern crusted with enough crem to look as though it had been moulded from clay. Despite signs out front offering chouta, the place is empty; the ceiling fan hangs dead because turning it on would call the long-speared things from the sky. The fat Alethi innkeeper scowls at Wit the moment he steps in — Wit had apparently promised to fill the room and has delivered exactly one customer. *My tyrannical liege, I believe you misunderstood.* He calls the innkeeper *mighty and terrible king,* presents Shallan as a *recruited subject* — pickpocketing her purse out of her pocket without her noticing — and gets himself ushered into the private chamber kept for lighteyed diners, blowing kisses about future revolutions on the way.

Behind the closed door Wit swings his boots up onto the seat beside him and looks the Veil illusion over. *Nice work. Most artists muddle the rear of the head.* The persona fled the moment he recognised her; she is now moving like a starched lighteyes in a tough girl's coat. He misses her red hair too, which would have been striking against the white — but she explains the disguise is supposed to be forgettable. The innkeeper brings them a mild orange to drink (it is still early), notices nothing odd about Pattern dimpling out from under his hand, and bustles back out. Wit composes him another song on the way out about all the things he has mistaken for young maidens.

*Is he one of them?* she finally blurts. *Is Wit a Herald?* He laughs the question off. Religion, he confesses, has lost his trust — there were seven prior attempts and every one a debacle; he is fairly sure there remains at least one deity worshipping him by oversight. Pressed on what he *is*, he gives her an extended evasion — some men grow kinder with age (not him), some grow wiser (not him), some grow more cynical (not him; if he were the air would warp around him), but other men, as they age, merely grow stranger. He is, he fears, that third kind. He likens himself to the dried bones of an alien animal weathering on a plain that used to be a sea — a curiosity, a marker that things have not forever been the shape they are.

Pressed again — *not a Herald, but of an age with them?* — he leans across the table and meets her eyes kindly. Babes is what the Heralds were when he had already worn through dozens of lifetimes. Old, he says, is a word for tired shoes. He is something else. She shivers, held by the blue depth of his eyes. Shadows move in them; shapes wear smooth across enormous time; boulders crumble, mountains flatten, seas retreat into desert. He goes on. When he was young, he says, he made a vow — that he would always be where he was needed, *there*. He has kept it. He really ought to have phrased that more carefully, since *there* can technically mean anywhere, and so far has tended to mean a random location of no use to anyone. The intensity breaks; she flops back in her seat.

The two of them lapse into a long, looping back-and-forth on stupidity, sincerity, and which kind of people you should push down stairs. He insists you push the stupid ones, not the sincere ones; she counters that some are both. *Then,* he advises, *you run.* When he mentions in passing that Sadeas counts twice in the population of stupid people, she has to tell him that someone has murdered Sadeas and that Aladar's investigators have stalled out without a culprit. He sits up sharply, genuinely irritated to have missed it. *I'd have applauded.*

Asked why he is in Kholinar, he admits he isn't entirely sure — he can know *where* he is supposed to be at any given moment, but not always what he is supposed to do once he gets there. *Why are you here?* he turns it back. *To open the Oathgate. Save the city.* Pattern hums on the table. *Lofty,* Wit agrees. *Yes, yes — aim at the sun. A long miss puts the arrow far away, and whoever it kills is, statistically, no one you know.*

The innkeeper brings food: small crumbling little Soulcast-grain cakes, each topped with one steamed cremling — a flat-tailed variety called a skrip, two big claws and long antennae. The difference between her plate and Wit's is the sauce, hers sweet and his spicy, kept aside in a cup; the kitchen has stopped bothering with separate masculine and feminine dishes. Wit does not eat; he stands at the small window and watches a Cult of Moments procession pass. She picks at the food, no appetite after the starving faces outside. *Eat up.* When she demurs again, he silently swaps his full plate for her empty one and tells her not to be persnickety — how is she meant to save anyone by starving herself?

She says she wants to become like him. He brushes the flattery aside, then asks her what she thinks power is. *Being able to alter things — what happens in other people's lives.* *And yourself too, of course.* *I don't matter.* *You should.* He pushes back on the Vorin virtue of selflessness, urges her to drink of the cup she means to give everyone else, and quips that he himself lives every day as though it were his last — by which, he immediately clarifies, he means soiled in his own urine and shouting for a nurse to fetch more pudding. She nearly chokes on her bite of cremling.

Pivoting back to the cult: yes, Wit confirms, the inner circle on the platform actually communes with the Revel's Heart. The cult welcomes new initiates without reservation, then burns through them like fuel. He cannot make the gate work himself — the spren bound into the fabrial will not heed him — but Shallan has the right key, and there is a way in: bring food to the revel. Being close to that Unmade tips its acolytes toward appetite, and the simple Soulcast grain everyone else in Kholinar is eating will not satisfy them. He has brushed against the cult's inner ring before, against his preference and can get her past the cordon if she brings something worth setting on the table. He warns her, in passing, to mistrust anyone who claims the gift of prophecy. She points out that he himself just said he can sense where he needs to be. He repeats the warning unchanged, word for word. Pattern ripples on the table, no longer humming, only sliding through new shapes in fast sequence.

She gathers herself to go. Will he return with her, join the rest? He puts an ear to the door. Shallan, unfortunately, is not what called him here. And as a parting gift: She already knows the *how* of changing the world, he tells her. What she needs to learn is the *why*. Then a smaller parting instruction — tell the man behind the bar that Wit vanished in coloured smoke; it will torment him for days. He slips around the door as the innkeeper opens it, exits unseen behind the man's back, and is gone. The innkeeper, finding Shallan alone, asks if Wit is going to perform tonight; she has no idea. *The man swore he'd treat me as a king,* the innkeeper grumbles. (*Well — he's certainly keeping his word,* Shallan manages.) She asks Pattern whether he knows anything about Wit. *No,* Pattern says. *He feels like… mmm… one of us.* She digs out spheres — minus the few that have vanished into Wit's sleeve — to tip the harried innkeeper, then heads for Yokska's shop already planning how to get the food the cult demands.