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Shallan, skipping a tutoring meeting with Adolin as cover, hurries to the room they share in Lasting Integrity and pulls out the cube. Pattern follows her in. He needs to confess. He took the cube; he had a duplicate key, made with Wit's help. He used it to talk to Wit himself — who, it turns out, has a matching cube — because he was frightened by how badly Shallan was fragmenting and didn't know who else to ask. Wit told him their conversations had been overheard: the Ghostbloods had been spying on Wit, and that was how Mraize knew about Pattern's worries, about the corrupted-spren seed, about everything. None of her friends has betrayed her. She wants to believe it. The dark voice she has begun calling Formless tells her that her trust kills.

She retreats into herself. Veil surges to the surface, gasps, recovers, and tells Pattern she could have helped — that he should have come to her. Then she does what she came to do: she calls Mraize on the cube. The connection is slow today. When he answers — *little knife* — she reports clean. She has eliminated the last human candidate in the fortress: Sixteen was Shin, not the short-Alethi-with-thinning-hair Mraize described. Restares is either disguised in a way she cannot see through, or simply not here. Mraize takes it calmly, allows she may be right, suggests Restares could have become a Lightweaver — variants exist in the cosmere that don't need a spren — and reminds her, almost in passing, that the Honorblades are poorly tracked these days even by his agents. He tells her to arm herself with Stormlight from the honorspren's stores: Restares does not fight unless cornered, but cornered there are few beings on the planet as dangerous. She asks after her own stability and gets the standard answer — *answers will help free you, once you've earned them.* Shouting outside ends the call.

* * *

Adolin walks softly into the fortress library to find Blended up on a step-stool counting through an upper shelf. The trial has been delayed for weeks now on procedural grounds, partly to await the return of the *High Judge* — a spren of some rare variety, the honorspren say, not the Stormfather as Adolin once assumed — and partly so Adolin himself can be taught enough of their law to not embarrass everyone. Blended is the inkspren emissary to Lasting Integrity and his tutor; her clipped, inverted speech (*you are*, *our time nearly is not*) takes weeks to get used to. Today she has news: the trial is set for three days from now, and he is not ready.

She offers him a way out. They will motion for a *trial by witness*: three testimonies against him on day one, his own testimony on day two, accusers' rebuttal and judgment on day three. It is rarely chosen because it permits so much weight against the accused, but it lets him speak for himself rather than navigate honorspren procedure, of which he is woefully ignorant. He recites the strategy they have drilled — that he cannot be held to account for the failures of ancient Radiants; that the modern Radiants are not the old orders; that present action proves present honor — and chooses the format.

Blended, looking down at her notes, warns him quietly that he believes too much in their honor. Honorspren are honorable, yes, but *honor* is not a fixed thing; men define it; no god enforces it any longer; spren like her are not mindless and their wills are strong. *What they are defines honor to them.* Adolin takes the point but holds his line: the honorspren care for the deadeyes, even Maya — to whom, he reminds her, Maya spoke her own name. Blended cocks her head: deadeyes do not speak. *Curious. Very curious…* She closes her book when he tries to laugh and does not laugh back.

They go to find out whether the High Judge is in. As they step around the corner where the northern plane meets the western, Adolin performs the fortress's usual disorienting rotation between gravities. Blended grants that he does it better than most. They are headed for the office of the honorspren handling his case when she pauses and waves him a different direction. A crowd is gathering at the gates. Not, as he first fears, his friends mounting an unwanted rescue, nor the assembled deadeyes outside snapping at last. The High Judge himself has arrived. Adolin follows along the western face to look. The judge, impossibly, is a human.

* * *

*Human?* Veil says, stopping in place. From above on the southern plane, she does not need to get close. Short, Alethi, thinning hair. The man she has been hunting. The *High Judge* is Restares. She elbows her way through a small crowd of honorspren to find Lusintia — the spren who showed her around the fortress on her first day. *That can't be the High Judge. I specifically asked if he was human.* He isn't, Lusintia answers, calmly. He may wear the form of a man, but he is an eternal and immortal spren — and he commanded the honorspren not to tell people he was here, especially not humans. He is Kalak, called Kelek'Elin among her people. A Herald of the Almighty. The man Mraize sent her to find — and, she now suspects, the man he wants her to kill — is one of the Heralds.