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Six years before, in the deep cold of a Hearthstone winter when the Lirin family cannot afford charcoal because nobody donates any to the surgery anymore, Lirin sits alone at his bench drinking violet wine straight from the jug while thirteen-year-old Kal turns the pages of an anatomical folio across the room. The fire is two coals and the windows are sealed with rags. *Don't make the same mistake I did, son*, his father slurs without looking up. *When you get to Kharbranth for school, stay there.* The townsfolk never wanted him back here. Wistiow's replacement — Brightlord Roshone, a bitter lighteyes banished by the king to this nowhere village — has implied without ever quite commanding that any man too foolish to charge for his work should not be paid for it, and the donations stopped at a word.

Lirin explains the petty arithmetic of it to Kal underneath the wine. Men want to fill holes they perceive in their better-thans. Wistiow let his peasants do as they wished and they ignored him; Roshone lets them know he finds them contemptible and they scramble to please him. The disgust Lirin feels is not for the townsfolk who have stopped knocking on the surgery door; it is for the man who can twist what is best in them into the worst of them with a sentence and a sneer.

Then footsteps outside the door. Lirin sets the jug down very carefully and gets to his feet. He opens the door on three masked townsmen with a metal bar between them. They demand the surgery's spheres for Roshone — who knows, of course, that they are here. Lirin walks back into the surgery without answering, lifts the uncovered cup of broam spheres from its shelf like a small captive sun, and steps slowly back to the threshold. The light blooms across the porch and finds every face under every mask: Luten by his limp (whose leg Lirin saved); Horl by his wide shoulders; Balsas by his fancy new coat. Lirin asks them quietly, with the broam light still on them, to come in and rob the man who has lived among them his whole life and healed their children. They fade back into the night without a word. Lirin shuts the door, sets the cup down on the table, and pours another glass of wine.