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Kaladin walks the inside-base patrol along the Kholinar wall with Lieutenant Noro's squad, having been formally signed onto the Wall Guard on Elhokar's order and folded straight into the rotation. It feels almost cheap — Bridge Four had been forged from worse than this — but he likes the men. Beard is spinning a tale about the time the Blackthorn himself gave him a knife for valour; Ved calls him a liar; the heavyset Alaward and Vaceslv keep trying to draft Kaladin into a card game that uncomfortably reminds him of Sah and the parshmen. Six on patrol is a lot, but Azure wants them moving in groups.

Beard's story collapses when Ved spots Adolin loitering at a corner in a Lightwoven face, an outrageous yellow suit, and the calmly chewing bulk of Drehy beside him. The squad eviscerates the wardrobe choice with the dedication of professionals. Adolin nods past — *all well on our end* — and the patrol moves on. Kaladin hazards a *but he's lighteyed, like us,* and learns that the squad are tenners, lowest dahn of the lighteyed stratification: they drink with tenners, marry tenners, despise the dueling-class middlers of the fifth and sixth dahn, and would no more trust a man in that yellow suit to hold a wall than Beard would trust himself in a harem. The mockery touches a nerve — Kaladin could happily rant about Amaram for an hour, and yet here he is biting his tongue while the squad slags off the best swordsman in Alethkar in a yellow suit who, if they'd give him five minutes, would charm the truncheons out of their belts. Out of habit he reaches for the spear he is not carrying; the Guard has equipped him with a side sword and a small round shield.

The patrol forms up around a chull-cart of grain leaving one of the Guard's warehouses. They drive it inward only one street before Velalant's soldiers in blue and red shove their way through the refugees and take the wagon away to feed the city — slowly, through long queues at Velalant's own armed distribution stations. A mid-street procession of Cult of Moments devotees in violet masks pulls up across their path, whipping their own forearms; the painspren that climb out of the ground around them are too large and the wrong colour and do not look human. The crowd turns hostile. Noro hesitates — orders are orders — until Velalant's troops force the cult clear, and the patrol backs off.

Returning to the wall, Kaladin presses his palm against the cold stone the way he might draw Stormlight and lets himself feel safe. *This is all the queen's fault,* Beard mutters at the foot of the stairwell, before Noro snaps him quiet. Climbing back up to their station tower, Kaladin asks the inevitable question: where is the Guard's food coming from? Beard, glancing over his shoulder, admits — between half-coherent tangents — that the first thing Azure did on taking command was lead an attack on a low monastery by the eastern gates to recover the only Soulcaster in Kholinar that had not been inside the palace when the queen turned. How they keep using it without drawing the city's screamers, he refuses or cannot say. *Have you noticed,* Kaladin presses, *that the highmarshal's Shardblade has no gemstone on pommel or crossguard?* The only Blade he has ever seen built that way is the Assassin in White's Honorblade. If Azure holds one, it would explain a great deal.

On the wall, Kaladin notices for the first time that Beard's white armband bears no glyphward. *I know a lot about telling which stories have been made up,* Beard says. *Nobody's watching over us, Kal.* Syl alights on his shoulder and asks, of all people, the question — does he really think nobody is up there? He confesses that he has spent his life pivoting between the two positions, and is now somewhere in the middle that he cannot name.

The wall drums change. *Assault on the wall.* Kaladin catches a pike from the rack, almost gives the form-up order before Noro can, and bites it back; Captain Deedanor is absent, Noro is ranking, and Kaladin is *not their commander.* The Fused strafe a different section of wall — a brief, brutal probing run — and streak away. The pike block stands down, sweating, having done nothing while other men died nearby. Noro takes Kaladin aside and indulgently forgives the pre-empted order; Kaladin asks to be released to find wounded farther along the wall. *Surgeons will already be there,* Noro says, and pats him on the shoulder. He walks back inside to his stew.