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Eshonai stands on the western shelf of the Tower in the long quiet after the Alethi withdrawal and sings the wrong rhythm to herself, softly, because the right one will not come. Below her, the Listener dead are being recovered by the bonded singers. Across the chasm, the Alethi army is a long brown line crawling back toward the warcamps. The trap her people set with the Alethi highprince Sadeas — for he *had* set it with them, the broken-honor man who would betray his own — should have ended the Blackthorn. It did not.

She replays in her mind what she saw. The Kholin formation closing on three sides. The wave of light from one of the bridgemen. A single human, glowing, scattering the front rank of a closing line. She has never seen the like. The old songs speak of such things; the Listeners do not, anymore, sing the old songs. She thinks of her mother and what her mother used to sing under her breath when the children were not supposed to be listening, and she is troubled in a way she cannot name.

She thinks back to the day, six years gone, when her delegation walked into Gavilar's feast at the new palace in Kholinar and signed the treaty her people then broke. She thinks of why they broke it. She thinks of the rhythm her people now sing — the one she will not name even to herself — and how readily they have all come to sing it. Across the chasm, the Alethi disappear into their warcamps. She lets them go. She turns from the rim and goes down to her dead.