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Shallan kneels by firelight in the wrecked caravan camp and closes Bluth's eyes without looking at the ripped-out hole in his torso. Around her the workers salvage what they can; from time to time a groan among the wounded cuts off as Vathah executes the last of the captured bandits one by one. She does not stop him. Looking at his face by the firelight she wonders what separates the heroes from the villains — one speech in the night? Vathah has lost seven of his own; they killed twice that many bandits, but the caravan has lost most of its guards too, including the Iriali swordsman Yix. About to rise, she sees the corner of a folded paper poking from Bluth's coat. It is the second sketch she did of him — uniformed, eyes forward, hero — slipped from her notebook at some point and kept against his chest. She presses the wrinkles flat and tells him he was a fine way to restart her collection after all.

Exhausted, hair a mess and her dress no better than a pauper's, she goes looking for the caravan leaders and finds Macob — an older bearded merchant in a felt cap, with an accent she cannot place — at a travel table with Tyn, the wiry lighteyed woman in tan leather who heads what is left of his guards. They take her *offer* as a thinly veiled threat backed by the soldiers she has somehow taken in hand, and bargain accordingly. Macob will dress her, feed her, and convey her in proper comfort the rest of the way to the Shattered Plains in return for her men's protection; he shakes on it, then concedes — slowly — that the merged caravan will travel under her authority. He insists Tvlakv's slaver wagons go at the back so the rest of the camp does not have to smell them.

Walking back across the burnt valley, she is caught hard by the arm in the dark by Vathah. He tells her his eyes saw a queen on the hilltop and find a child now — perhaps, she answers, he saw what his conscience needed him to see. He leans in close, breath sour, and tells her that his men have done worse out in the wilderness than the bandits at the pyres; one good night does not absolve them, and one good night will not stop the nightmares. Going to the Plains under her promise means hanging the moment they arrive. *Your word means nothing, woman.* Pattern, on the back of his own coat, speaks aloud: *you should let her go.* Vathah spins to look for the speaker, sees no one, releases her arm, wipes his hand on his trousers and retreats. Pattern slides down his leg to her, and she rubs the bruise rising on her arm and tells him that one will be trouble; Pattern observes drily that he already is.

She walks on to Tvlakv at his wagon. He greets her with a thin smile and a theory: Bluth was clearly in league with the bandits from the start, which would explain why they had not been killed already — until even he gives up trying to make the story hold together. He tells her *her Almighty* is a farce; she answers that he should hope so, because if not, Damnation itself waits for men like him. Then she opens the back of Tag's wagon with the key Tvlakv gave her and takes payment in kind: she is claiming his five surviving slaves as soldiers' dues, and he will hand over their writs of slavery — *the Stormfather help you if they are not in order, I'm very good at spotting forgeries* (she has never seen one in her life). When Tvlakv refuses to come to the Plains, she lets him keep his parshmen and buys the third wagon off him for five sapphire broams. She offers the five freed men six firemarks a week to serve her, five of which she will hold back against their debt — *we take away the same amount either way*, one says; she tells him *that's the best kind.*

On her way back across the camp, she passes the deserters at the funeral pyres. They have just thrown the last of their own dead into the flames. A darkeyed caravan woman steps up with a glyph prayer she has drawn and hands it to the short eye-patched man — not a prayer of mourning, but a prayer of thanks. He holds it up so the others can read it, and then the freed soldiers turn together and realise for the first time that two dozen workers and children are standing silent in the dark, some weeping, watching them. They do not know what to do with that. They burn the prayer. Shallan bows her head with the watchers as the ashes rise toward the Almighty, and she leaves the men standing taller than she found them.