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Venli feels every rhythm in her head freeze when she sees Rlain in the cell. In that silence she finally believes what Mazish told her the night before — that all of Roshar has shifted, that she is no longer the last listener — and for a moment thinks she can hear a distant pure tone beyond the rhythms. Then Rlain looks up through the bars and sneers at her. He has picked up human expressions in his years away; and he probably sees only an unfamiliar Regal, not the Eshonai-and-Venli he never quite knew well enough to begin with.

She speaks first with the direform jailer who runs the prison the humans had built. The cells are still mostly empty; the prisoner has been locked here because his story about being held against his will did not hold up — anyone the singers interviewed remembered him as the Radiants' companion, free to leave at any time and choosing not to. He is, the direform says contemptuously, *an essai* — a Fused-borrowed word for *human lover*, which her form tells her literally means *hairy.* She outranks him as Raboniel's Voice and dismisses him from the room.

Out of habit she glances into Shadesmar and notices, just in time, a Voidspren hiding in the body of a cremling in the corner — the way they have learned to circumvent the tower's anti-invisibility field. She does not panic. She paces; she shoos the cremling out under the door; she watches its little spark of light retreat into the distance through the riot of colour that is the tower in Shadesmar, then turns back to Rlain.

She tells him in the listener tongue that she is herself, that this form does not change her the way stormform changed the others. He asks about her sister, hopeful. She tells him she saw Eshonai's corpse herself at the bottom of the chasms, and that of their people only the two of them are left — that Odium kept her alive to be a survivor with stories to tell, because as a group he had been afraid of them. *I'm sorry,* Rlain says, eventually. He does not know that she is the one who caused all this; to him she is simply another survivor. The thought frightens her. He explains his own story — placed on a bridge crew as an experiment in the warcamps, taken for a parshman too clever by half, never identified as a spy — and presses her to use whatever standing she has in the tower to get him free. *They're my friends. My family, now.* When she dithers he loses patience. *Stop being so insufferably selfish! Do something against your own self-interest, for the greater good, for once in your storming life, Venli.* She hums to Betrayal, then to his Confidence. *I'll try.*

She finds Raboniel not in her usual basement chambers but, oddly, in the Blackthorn's former rooms. An unusual number of senior Fused — Leshwi herself among them — are systematically cataloguing every possession of the warlord: socks, papers, books, each pair recorded and packed. Such a high-grade detail for so ordinary an inventory whispers something meaningful to her about who, very high up, has taken an interest in this human.

Inside the bedroom Raboniel is granting an audience she does not usually grant humans: to a tall, scarred Thaylen man in fine cut clothing, with a strange beaked, bright-scaled creature on his shoulder whose eyes Venli finds unsettlingly intelligent. He is here, he says loud and bold, to encourage her to meet with his babsk and negotiate terms for use of the Oathgates. He hands her a pouch as advance — heavy, clinking — and Raboniel looks inside and for a long moment speaks without rhythm. *How? Where did you get this?* The pouch, the Thaylen says, is not the gift. Two attendants haul in a cloth-covered, bar-sided crate. He whips the cloth off. Inside: a small teenage human girl who growls from the shadow at the back. *If your master ever finds Cultivation,* he says to Raboniel with a formal bow, *suggest that he ask her why she made an Edgedancer who is fuelled by Lifelight and not Stormlight.* Then he walks out before he can be dismissed. Raboniel does not have him executed; she hums Conceit, and smiles, and orders the child taken to somewhere secure — *be careful; she might be dangerous.*

Turning to Venli for the matter that brought her, Raboniel confirms the report: another of her people. *Yes,* Venli says. *His name is Rlain. A listener.* Raboniel calls him a child of traitors. *As am I,* Venli says, and then — pushing herself onto the wrong-feeling Rhythm of Conceit, which Timbre supplies because it is the Odium-shape closest to Resolve — demands him released into her care as compensation for her service. Raboniel hums Derision, then, after a beat, *Very well. Your Passion does you credit. He is yours. Be certain he doesn't cause problems, for I will lay them at your charge.* Venli retreats. Timbre aches inside her, as if forcing herself onto a wrong rhythm cost her something.

Back in her own rooms, Venli thinks her next oath has just made itself plain — to seek freedom for those in bondage, as she has done now twice — but Timbre urges her to do it privately. She shuts the door and whispers: *I will seek freedom for those in bondage.* Nothing happens. Then a far-off femalen voice thrumming with the pure rhythm of Roshar tells her: *these words are not accepted.* She sits down. The reason arrives at once: she chose Rlain mostly because she wanted another listener to confide in, and she stood beside Raboniel only minutes ago and watched a caged child hauled away without a word. If she means to grow as a Radiant, she will have to do as he said — start thinking of someone other than herself — and treat the powers she has begun to use with the respect they deserve.