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Outside the imperial tent at Azimir in the cool of evening, a surgeon kneels at Adolin's stump and fits a hogshide-cupped peg over what is left of his right leg. He stares at the missing limb — pinned, somewhere out there, beneath the corpse of the thunderclast — while the surgeon straps and lectures: a tight fit, Regrowth for clean scars, Navani's pain-fabrials worn from now on. *Lucky,* the surgeon says of the speed. *Yeah,* Adolin says, and regrets it. He stands. He slips. He stands again. The surgeon will not spice the words: most pegged men live their lives on crutches; a few learn to manage on the peg alone, faster for duelists than others. *Brightlord, I don't want you in combat. Ever.* Adolin closes his eyes, remembering Zabra hearing him say nearly the same thing.

He limps back into the tent, where Yanagawn is waiting at the towers board for their evening game. Three thinning shield-ranks fight at the dome behind them; Abidi the Monarch is inside the breach proclaiming the Heralds dead. Adolin reports to no one in particular that the defence cannot last another day and a half, and then Yanagawn executes a clean envelopment off the dominant terrain and wins. Adolin hands him the next stage of his training — *you've stopped being a beginner* — and quotes Sadees at the boy: a hundred days of preparation for one day of spontaneity. Looking for Gezamal among the guards, he finds the man missing; Yanagawn tells him, quietly, that he was reassigned for the act of marching beside the emperor into yesterday's fight. Adolin is irate. Yanagawn explains the azaderach-tor: he reigns but does not rule, and the law that protects Gezamal for being right is the same law that requires the punishment. Adolin thinks the attitude contemptible, and says so.

Far from the imperial fire, on the road between monasteries, Szeth watches his cookfire die and tries to find any emotion at all to paste over the ball of stone his insides have become. *A Herald. Eternal.* He had always counted on death as the end of his accounts; if he finishes this pilgrimage, death will be no end, only one more night before the next morning's killing. A figure approaches the embers — not Kaladin or Sylphrena or Nin, but his own highspren, who has taken human shape for the first time. They speak. Nale put Nightblood in Szeth's hands as a test of character, the spren tells him, and he has passed by not using it. Kaladin's flute drifts over from the next hillside, halting and bad and oddly alive, and the highspren watches it with something Szeth reads as envy. *Do you wish our bond was more like theirs?* *I shouldn't.*

The spren sketches, as far as he understands it, how a new Herald could be made: the Oathpact is unravelling because Jezrien is dead, but the hole could be patched if a piece of Honor were forged into a new Blade and a candidate spoke *the most important Words.* He cannot be told them. *I know,* Szeth says, and feels the right Words already inside him. Ishar has foreseen that millions upon millions will suffer if the Oathpact is not reforged. *Then I will do it,* Szeth whispers, and asks whether there was ever any question that he would. *Well, not until Kaladin started … you know. Helping.* He worries about Nin's vanishing into the night before the Skybreaker monastery, and the spren, suddenly humble, admits he has the same questions Szeth does. *I want to be your partner.* The embers go dark, and Szeth sits with peace as a thing he is allowed to want but not to keep.

Back at Azimir Adolin limps the courtyard alone with Notum giving him reports — three-rank lines, raw second-and-third-wave levies plugging the front, weak points building into the wall. He finds Gezamal downwind of the officers' latrines in apron and gloves, on the very kind of duty officers do not do. Adolin tells him the demotion is an insult to every officer who has ever made a snap correct decision; Gezamal cuts him off — *do not speak ill of the emperor* — and tells him plainly that what he did was what needed to be done and that this is too. *You can't punish a good officer for making a good decision.* *Accepting your punishment with decorum is a mark of respect for the thing we all love.* He talks about loving the empire — the law that lets a thief become emperor, the art and the writing standing against ignorance and lies, even the bureaucratic weight that hurts now and then because anything you love hurts you. There is a threshold, and his hasn't been reached. Adolin watches another soldier nod at him in passing — no salute, but the same respect — and starts back across the courtyard wondering if he loves anything that hurts him. Not something. Someone. A father.

Colot walks with him in the dying moonlight and quietly admits the same shape of feeling. It hurt being passed over by the Windrunners for being lighteyed. *I get what Gezamal said. I'm still here. Despite when it hurts.* Notum zips back to fetch him to take over for Kushkam elsewhere; Colot jogs off. Adolin balances on the peg and listens to other men fight, and feels the dread of the morning come up to meet him. They are not going to last another day and a half.