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Jasnah has been near war many times — staged in mobile warcamps, walked battlefields, even fought at Thaylen Field — but she has never gone to war as a soldier. Dalinar urged her to: until you stand in the line, no account can prepare you. So she walks past her own troops in Shardplate dulled to look ordinary, and faces what the Mink has chosen as the day's ground: the Drunmu Basin in Emul, a vast plain of shivering grass and pile-vines where roughly forty thousand singers wait at a slight rise. Numbers on a page become meaningless. She has not come to fight forty thousand; she has come to fight a tide.

The horns sound and her block marches. The first arrows hail down before Azish light cavalry under Windrunner cover scatter the enemy archers. Two Edgedancers stay close at Dalinar's request. The singer line resolves into deep pikes and locked shields — drilled troops, not the parshendi of the Plains; the Fused have learned modern warfare. Jasnah's job is to break the line. She crashes into it with Ivory as Blade, sweeping pike-heads free, and they refuse to break — only buckle. She manages to ram her Blade through one warform, burning the eyes; others dance back, prodding her with pikes she had underestimated. She nearly loses her footing, controls the stumble, and crashes back to her line.

She charges in again, and the formation opens around a hulking Magnified One, axe-blades of carapace overgrowing his hands — a Fused who can grow his own armour, with the Surge of Progression, in the middle of a fight. The regular soldiers on both sides give way. Ivory points out, again, that there is another reason she fights, and she ignores it. She tries the Blade and the duel goes badly: the Magnified One overgrows carapace through her chest to pin her to the rock, breaks his arm off to walk away, and leaves her for the line to harvest. Pikes ram up through her faceplate; one pierces her eye, and Stormlight heals it before her helm seals shut. She cuts free with Ivory as dagger and gets to one knee, and the Fused looms again.

Fine. She reaches for the air around her — stagnant and morose — and gives it a single, firm command: change. Her honor guard knows the sign and pulls back. The bored air becomes oil, raining for ten yards and even gathering in the mouths of the enemy. She slams a steel gauntlet against a flint one, sparks, and the entire patch of battlefield catches alight. The Magnified One stumbles in shock; Jasnah lunges, Ivory becomes a needle, and the Fused's gemheart pops. She walks out of the fire as a burning Shardbearer, and the enemy line breaks against her. After that she fights like a butcher — hacking, throwing bodies, making waves her own troops can ride — until an Edgedancer presses a fresh topaz into her hand and tells her plainly that if she keeps going more soldiers will die guarding her than the enemy will lose. She accepts the wisdom and turns away.

At the reserves Wit arrives with a small group of servants and a bowl of fruit, full valet service on a battlefield. She lets her helm dismiss away and stares at all of it. Two hours, only. She has read every account of how soldiers cope and could find none of that focus in herself. The taste of the fruit shocks her — *cool sweetness* from another world — and she remembers Dalinar has done this for hours on end across whole campaigns and carries the scars. Wit will not be drawn into the lie that any fight is fair: two men of the same height and weapon will never fight fairly, because one always has the advantage of training or talent or simple luck. He acknowledges she has been trying to prove she can fight without her powers, that it breaks down the kind of barrier some men insist on, but tells her plainly to stop — using her Surges is no more unfair than the most skilled swordsman on a field falling to a stray arrow. Use what you have. He sneers across the field at a single hilltop where bursts of light keep killing every brave charge that tries to rush it, and says they are nearing the end of traditional battlefield formations. Things will change when those powers stop being rare.

She refuses his offer of a hand-massage and walks back out. Seven hours later, the battle is done and night smothers the Basin. She tramps across the corpse-scattered ground in the dark, makes for the lit coalition tent, and instead sits down on a stone outside. The Mink finds her there. He throws sparks from a Herdazian sparkflicker and tells her she did well to go onto the line — every commander should be reminded periodically — and that the day was a step forward, though not a rout. *Never take casualty reports on the night of a battle.* He tells her Wit is in her tent, disturbed.

Inside, Wit sits in her travel chair scribbling furiously in five different alien scripts. He plasters on a smile and tries to deflect her until she presses. He has failed her, he says. A pen in his writing case was not a pen but a cremling cleverly grown to look like one — one of the Sleepless — and he does not know when it was switched in, only that his protections, which were supposed to warn him of exactly that, did not. They have to assume everything he has written, and everything she has told him, is known. He thinks none of the Sleepless are aligned with Odium; but at least one of them, he is now sure, has thrown in with the Ghostbloods. Then, quietly: *I believe it is time I told you about Thaidakar.* She knows the name. *You think you do,* he says. He has met him in person on other planets. The Ghostbloods are not a Rosharan organisation, and she does not yet understand the size of the threat they pose.