Recorded at a waystation in the Boundary Lands, five days after the tournament. Mirah Dawnstride fought the fourth match and lost it in twelve seconds. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(She sat with her back to the wall, as Saltmarch people tend to. Fifteen years carrying through the Shimmering Expanse, Air-connected, fast enough to have crossed the dominion in two days when a message justified it. She'd checked who I was before I arrived, and she told me so cheerfully and didn't say how.)

Scholar: Tell me about your match.

Mirah: Twelve seconds. I've been telling it as a joke for five days so I don't have to think about it.

(She grinned.)

Mirah: Ask me properly, though.

Scholar: What did you do?

Mirah: Seven images. My best work. Seven, all moving independently, all doing different things, and I'm in among them somewhere doing an eighth.

Scholar: Illusion, then.

Mirah: That's what people call it, and they picture me painting pictures. It's about where attention goes. You give people a lot to look at, and then you stand where they aren't looking.

Scholar: And Cross?

Mirah: Shut their eyes.

(She paused there for effect.)

Mirah: Which everybody has heard, and everybody thinks means they tracked me by sound, and that's wrong.

(The grin went.)

Mirah: They walked straight past every one of the copies to the one place in that arena where my working wasn't happening, which was the place I was standing in.

Scholar: Your images were the working, and you were standing outside it.

Mirah: Right.

(She turned her cup.)

Mirah: Everyone's told me that's impressive, and they've got it the wrong way round.

Scholar: Explain the wrong way round.

Mirah: Look. My whole craft is that attention is a thing with a shape. I move it. I know where yours is going before you do, and that's the actual skill, the images are just the tool.

(She held up two fingers.)

Mirah: Two things happened in twelve seconds that shouldn't. First, they weren't looking at any of it, and I'm talking about more than their eyes being shut. The part of a person that looks was pointed somewhere else entirely, nowhere near my working. Second, and this is the bit, I couldn't find them.

Scholar: Find them how?

Mirah: I read people. Everyone does a bit, I do it professionally. Where's your weight, where's your attention, what do you want, what are you frightened of. In a fight I've usually got a rough shape of somebody inside four seconds.

(She'd gone serious by now.)

Mirah: I got nothing off them. A guarded person still gives off plenty, and so does a very controlled person going blank, because the blankness is itself something I can read and it tells me a lot.

Scholar: Nothing at all.

Mirah: There was a man in front of me and there was no one there. Twelve seconds, and about eight of them I spent trying to get a read and failing. That's why I lost. The sword hardly mattered.

Scholar: Do you have an explanation?

Mirah: I've got four and they're all rubbish. Do you want them?

Scholar: Yes.

Mirah: One, they've got something out of a House nobody's published. I don't believe it, because I know what House work looks like from outside and this had none of the joins showing. Two, they're so far up the tiers that it's a different game, except everyone would have felt that and nobody felt anything. I've been near Presence, and you can't miss it. Three, they're not a practitioner at all, which doesn't survive what they did to my images or what they did to the Hollowglass girl's cage.

Scholar: And four?

(She said this more carefully than anything else.)

Mirah: Four is that it's got nothing to do with them being good. The winning's a side effect. Whatever they are just makes working stop happening near them, and then they only have to be a decent swordsman, and they are a decent swordsman. A decent swordsman against somebody who's suddenly got no craft isn't much of a fight.

Scholar: You believe four.

Mirah: I think four's the only one that explains the sand.

(She shrugged.)

Mirah: I don't like it, though. If four's right, there wasn't really a fight.

Scholar: There's a theory in Greytower that they're Ironvale.

(She laughed properly at that, head back.)

Mirah: Somebody said that to me on day two and I asked if they'd ever met an Ironvale.

(She wiped her eye.)

Mirah: Sorry. It's not funny. It's a bit funny. You always know when an Ironvale's in the building. With Cross you'd never have known. The only reason anyone's saying it is that Ironvale is the House people reach for when a stranger's good with a sword.

Scholar: Then who are they?

Mirah: I don't know. And I want you to write down that I said I don't know, in those words.

Scholar: Why in those words?

(She wasn't smiling now.)

Mirah: Because I'm Saltmarch. I carry things, and what I carry is true. People think it's a motto. It's the condition of my employment. For five days people have been asking me what I saw, and I've been giving them a story with a shape and an ending, because that's what a person wants after twelve seconds of something horrible.

Scholar: Is the story untrue?

Mirah: The story's true. Every fact in it is true.

(She turned the cup again.)

Mirah: But the shape of it is a lie, because the shape says and then I understood. And I didn't. I still don't. So I'd like it in your record, from me, in the words I'd use, that Mirah Dawnstride does not know what she fought.

Scholar: Last thing. Would you fight them again?

Mirah: Yes, straight away. That worries the people who know me.

(Some of the brightness had come back.)

Mirah: I wouldn't be trying to win. I'd like about four seconds of just standing there paying attention properly, because I spent my twelve seconds panicking and looking for something that wasn't there.

Scholar: And what would you be paying attention to?

Mirah: Whether it's them.

(She said it quite lightly.)

Mirah: Whether the nothing is a thing they're carrying, or whether the nothing is what they are. Those are extremely different, and everybody I've spoken to has skipped straight past the question.

Scholar's note. Dawnstride is the first witness to suggest that Cross's victories are a by-product rather than an achievement, and the first to separate the question of what they do from the question of what they are. She worked both out on her own in five days, while telling the story as a joke to travellers.

Before I left she asked me again to confirm that I'd print her not-knowing, and I said I would.