Lock this slave up. Her words, uttered the day she’d fought a duel for his sake, still hurt. What had followed: the clench of helplessness. Being outnumbered by her father’s private guard. The first blow. The way she hadn’t looked back as she’d let the door shut behind her. Humiliation. A sort of appalled admiration. Indebtedness. Later: her, injured and limping across the villa’s lawn.

It had changed him. Exposed something running inside him like a vein of soft gold. A slow attraction. Growing, despite himself, into care . . . and more.

That incident last autumn when she’d tricked him, had him locked in a cell while she rode to the duel, loomed in his mind as a little story that told the larger one of how she’d been broken, and he’d been kept safe, and how his safety and her brokenness had broken him.

Now she stared him down. His gaze traced the fall of a single, newly plaited braid over her shoulder, its color obscure in the twilight. He recalled the fold of the dead Valorian girl’s body over his blade. His sister being dragged to the cloakroom.

“You can’t stay,” he told her.

“It’s not your choice.”

“It’s not safe.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“You don’t command this army.”

Roshar smiled.

“No,” said Arin. “Don’t.”

“What do you propose, my lady?”

“My prince, I wish to enlist. I swear to serve, and rout your enemy, and wash my blade with his blood.”

“How savagely Valorian of you. Is this the traditional military oath? I like it. I accept.”

She nodded slightly and cast Arin an unreadable look—tinged, perhaps, with something like regret, though it was hard to know exactly what had affected her. Maybe it was his expression, or maybe a memory floating invisibly in the darkening summer air, seen only by her.

She left them.

“If you send her into battle,” Arin told Roshar, “ she’ll fall in the first wave.”

“Why, because she’s half your size? I’ll wager she’s had more training than the average foot soldier.”

“She has no talent for it and little experience.”

“She wants this, Arin. I don’t blame her for wanting it, and quite frankly I think her help could be crucial.”

“Her advice. Let her advise, then. Enlist her, rank her, if you must. But keep her out of combat.”

“All right,” Roshar said. “For you.”

Arin turned to leave. His head was brimming, his heart sore.

Roshar touched his shoulder, surprisingly gentle. “I know you want her to be safe forever, but it’s just not that kind of world.”

Arin begged a pair of Herrani officers to share a tent. He shouldered the spare one, loosely bundled. He found a woman about Kestrel’s height and bartered a little boot knife for a set of decent clothes. He rummaged through supply wagons and stared dully at the extra suits of armor: all far too large. Swords: too heavy. He considered a gun among the many rows of them, hidden in a false bottom below bales of horse feed. Unsure, he left the guns where they lay. Finally, he snagged an eastern crossbow. Even if Roshar kept his word and tried to keep Kestrel from any real military action, there was always the possibility of a surprise attack.

He brought every thing to Kestrel. It was full night. Light from a nearby fire flickered in her face. He tried not to look at her. He crouched and began to set the tent’s frame. He drove a stake into the earth. Drier now.

There was a pause after he hammered the first stake in. He straightened.

“I thought . . .” Kestrel’s voice trailed into the dark. She didn’t say what she thought. She touched his wrist, light as a moth.

Arin flinched. He didn’t mean to. He wanted to undo it, yet flitting through his mind was a nightmarish sequence of images: a masker moth, the signed treaty in Kestrel’s wintry hand, the Valorian girl he had killed at sea. His mother’s bloody black hair.

Kestrel drew back. He seemed to feel her echo his hurt. “I can do that.” She took the stone from his hand. “My father taught me how to pitch a tent. I remember.”

What else do you remember? Arin wanted to ask, and was repulsed by himself. He knew how much what she did remember wounded her. He hadn’t thought it’d be possible to hate the general more, yet there it was: a hot jet of hatred. He said, “I won’t spare your father.”

The shadows were too deep between them. He couldn’t read her face. She said, “I don’t want you to.”