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Adolin walks to the last day of his trial in Lasting Integrity with leaden steps, weighing the offer Shallan made the night before to break him out if he is convicted. To accept would prove what the eldest honorspren have been saying — and he wonders whether the most useful thing he can be is the living testimony of an honour kept, even in a cell.

The forum is the most crowded yet. He notes two things on his way down: Shallan and Pattern are not in their seats, and Kelek is not on the judge's bench. Sekeir is. The bearded elder informs him that the Holy One is indisposed — his wife went to him in secret and *tried to influence the trial*, was caught with a curious weapon, and is being held; Kelek has been relieved because of his long-standing herald affliction, and Sekeir will not be as lax as he was. Adolin hides a spike of joy — so that was what Shallan had been up to — and reads a crowd more divided than yesterday but darker overall.

Sekeir opens by calling for silence, ejects three honorspren for whispering, and reads a long prepared speech about humanity finally paying for its sins. When Adolin interrupts to ask him to skip to the verdict, a honorspren steps up beside him with a gag pulled taut between her hands and Sekeir informs him that the defendant does not interrupt the judge. He drops into parade rest, the stance Zahel hammered into him, and takes the lashes silently.

Then Sekeir calls his final witness, and it is Maya. Amuna leads her in by the hand. They place her on a podium; she cocks her head toward Adolin for a moment, then notices the great crowd around her and shrinks, turning her scratched-out gaze about in quick jerks. He cannot catch her eye. His fury rises — and he notes the eldest honorspren at the back with stormy expressions of their own.

*Do you recognise this deadeye*, Sekeir asks. *That is Mayalaran. She is my friend.* Sekeir sneers at the word — what does friendship mean, dinner together, fireside chats? *We exercise together*, Adolin says, and Sekeir turns the answer on him: men do not ask permission of Shardblades; they take them and use them. She is not his friend, she is his slave. *Yes*, Adolin admits, looking away from her. Yes, even now that they know what she is, they use her. They need to. *Because you need to kill*, Sekeir says, walking up to him. *Humans are monsters. You do not fight Odium. You* are *Odium.* Adolin tells him quietly that his point is made, to let Maya go, to pass his judgment.

Sekeir will not. He thrusts her forward to the crowd as the *result of trusting men* and turns the spectacle on her. Maya begins to thrash; Amuna and another honorspren grab her arms; she snarls and twists between them. Sekeir declares that he can read her emotions and that her pain is her condemnation of Adolin; her howls grow ragged and inarticulate and frantic. Adolin shouts that this is a trial by witness and that the judge is interfering; Blended, a dark stripe in the bright crowd, nods that this is true, and other honorspren rise to object — but Sekeir will not stop. *Listen to her demand your punishment!* he shouts over the rising din. *Listen to her cry for blood!* Adolin lunges; the honorspren beside him pin him. *LET HER GO!* He sees, somehow, that Maya's agony has turned to anger, and that the anger is for the honorspren holding her. *Her screams are your judgment*, Sekeir cries — and then *Take some of my strength*, Adolin thinks to her.

Maya draws a long breath. She speaks.

*We! CHOSE!*

The forum goes still. Sekeir stops with his back to her. She forces it out again, panting — *We … We chose* — and the hands on Adolin go slack. He shoves past Amuna, gets under Maya's arm, and supports her like a wounded soldier. She clings to him and finds her voice again: *We chose. Adolin, we chose.* Sekeir is stammering when she points at him, opens her jaw further than a jaw should open, and screams the rest: *You. Cannot. Have. My. SACRIFICE! Mine. My sacrifice. Not yours.* — pointing at the crowd — *Not theirs.* — at Adolin — *Not his. Mine. MY SACRIFICE.*

Adolin says it aloud for the audience: the Radiants knew what would happen when their orders broke their oaths in the Recreance. Their spren were not murdered — they decided together. *We chose*, Maya belts again. He helps her sit on the front bench, and the honorspren there scramble away. He stares down Sekeir and the eldest cluster on the bench, daring them to keep going. They do not. They begin, by ones and twos, to trail away — confused, haunted — and the elders gather around Sekeir and lead him off in hushed tones. They give Adolin and Maya a wide berth.

Blended comes down last. *I should like to take credit for your victory*, she says, *but it was not my tutelage that won this.* She admits she was the one who suggested to the elders that they use a deadeye as a witness — she wanted to know whether the truth he had told her about Maya was real, and she had records of the name. She did not suggest the cruelty; that is theirs. She must now leave for the inkspren with what she has seen. Centuries of easy story — *humans were selfish, humans were murderers* — must give way to a far darker question: thousands of spren chose death rather than let the Radiants continue, and they believed they had to do it because Surgebinding would destroy the world. Adolin asks Maya whether she and her order knew they would become deadeyes. She pushes through her exhaustion. *Pain. Yes. Death? No. Maybe.* *Why?* he asks. *To save … save…* — and she sags. *To save us from something worse*, Adolin says.

Blended tells him she has long thought herself smart and now sees her own stupidity; she calls the entire formal trial a farce and tells him the *real* test was the years he spent on a single spren's loyalty — that Maya was the only judge who ever mattered, and today was her chance to give judgment. He passed. She leaves to carry the news to the inkspren; her people will not promise new Radiants, but they will admit that humanity's ancestors were not traitors and that something else, dangerous and still unknown, frightened spren and Radiants together into ending themselves.

Adolin lets Maya rest and then stands. She joins him, eyes still scratched but conserving herself now, present in a way she has not been since he found her. She rasps the words back at him: *Stren… Stren. Be…* He finishes for her. *Strength before weakness.* She nods, exhausted. He needs to find Shallan and get to the Oathgate — and he suspects the entire shape of the Radiant relationship will never be quite the same.