POV: lirin
Summary
Lirin, a surgeon in occupied Hearthstone, works the morning inspection line in the fog with the calm of long training and the nerves of a conspirator: hidden somewhere in the day's column of Herdazian refugees is the man the Fused would most like to find, and Lirin has agreed to sneak him in. He examines a frightened mother and her son for scurvy, hands her a juice chit, and promises he will notify her if her missing children are found; he tells a one-armed Alethi with empty eyes and a stolen wife to ask for the suicide-watch tent. He has more than a hundred refugees to see and a queue stretching off into the mist behind hungerspren and exhaustionspren. A year after the Everstorm and the fall of Alethkar, two more months of war have crushed Herdaz for good, and this is what is left.
Brightness Abiajan, the new citylady — a singer in a havah, who insists on the new name and the new title — pauses to needle Lirin about how easily he tells each broken refugee he is sorry for their loss, calling him a stone. He answers, the same way he answered her broken arm when she was still a slave child, that a surgeon cannot afford to weep. She moves on. Laral passes along the line in a servant's dress with a water bucket and the day's intelligence: three down. The Herdazian general is shorter than she had imagined. They talk under the cover of cups about whether Lirin should turn the man in — he calls war a hopeless heroism that swallowed one of his sons and stole the other — and agree that he will not. Roshone, now a peg-legged crem-scraper, is ready with the distraction.
When the cloaked Herdazians reach the stool, Lirin makes them sit so they look less like a bodyguard and tells the leader to begin with him. Dieno enne Calah — *the Mink* — has manacle scars on his wrists, a silvered moustache, and a quiet thanks ready for the man giving his resistance a place to hide. Lirin does not let himself accept it. The invaders hold the sword to his neck and he obeys the person holding the sword, the same as he always has. He invents a leg wound on one of the Mink's soldiers, calls loudly for a litter, and stages the whole party out of the line as bearers. Across the field, Roshone staggers drunk and peg-legged out into view, tries to climb a stool to scrape crem from a roof, and gives the watching singer guards — every one of them once owned by some lighteyes — a better show than any storyteller. Only Dor, the lead inspector, gives the litter a real look; the rest are watching Roshone miss the stool.
Lirin is almost past the post when Abiajan calls out behind him. He freezes; the soldiers around the Mink keep walking, then halt with hands shifting beneath their cloaks. But Abiajan's rhythm has gone staccato — flustered, not accusatory. *We have been blessed.* She tells the inspectors to hold the gate and tugs Lirin out across the field to meet what has come down out of the fog.
What has come is one of the Fused. Seven feet tall, his hair so dark it could be his clothing, his black skin marbled red beneath the eyes, his carapace lifted into two horn-like fins above his ears, his eyes glowing a soft red. Lirin has seen the Fused only once before, at a distance — robed Heavenly Ones in passing — and this one is wicked-looking in a way those were not. A warform singer translates for him. They are hunting a spy who would not be on Abiajan's lists: a young man, fit beneath whatever weakness he has feigned, tall for a human, with wavy black hair to the shoulders and a slave's brand on his forehead — the glyph *shash*. *Dangerous.*
Lirin's small hope that the patrol is here for Dieno dies on those words. Behind him a singer soldier yanks a hood back and exposes the hardened face of the son he barely recognises, no longer the gentle boy he raised. Kaladin bursts alight with Stormlight. Despite Lirin's every careful arrangement, death has come to Hearthstone in his son's hands.