Norikane Sazagawa holds the southernmost province of Shyona, the band of farmland that runs down to the reed flats of Meadow Sound and stops where the Krell jungle begins. Lords of his house have watched the Krell creep north for three centuries, and watched the kingdom of Velkoron, the last buffer between the jungle and Shyonan soil, fall in the Grinding while the council was still deliberating whether to send it help. Sazagawa is the one who stopped waiting for the council to do something about it.
Shyona has no capital and no standing army, only a council of provincial lords who hold that an agreement reached slowly lasts longer than one forced quickly. On the question of who should garrison the southern frontier, the council has been reaching slowly for the better part of a century and has produced nothing. Sazagawa's answer was to mortgage his house's revenues and hire the Goldwatch, the mercenary companies of the Nameless Ones, to raise and hold the Tazumori Line. It is the most consequential thing a southern lord has done in living memory, and it has made him the most resented man on the council. He pays the cast-out to defend the realm that cast them out. The northern houses take this as a double disgrace: that Shyona's own will not stand the wall, and that the men who do are the ones Shyona unmade. Their case on the council is led by Lord Masakane Higumori, whose argument against the contract is principled rather than craven. Sazagawa grants him the principle and grants him nothing else, holding that a man whose province will never see a Krell can afford convictions the south cannot.
What makes Sazagawa worth watching is that he shares the contempt he traffics in. He is not a reformer. He has never set foot on the Line he funds, never learned a Goldwatch officer's use-name, and still speaks of the Nameless the way every Shyonan lord does, as people who forfeited the right to be people. He hired them because they were available, competent, and willing to die where his own tenants would not, and he tells himself nothing more generous than that. His own courts have turned exiles south over the years, name-stripped and disowned, by his own judgment. Some of them stand on the Line now, drawing his coin. Whether the Goldwatch Tallymen hold an entry for a face Sazagawa once condemned, the lord has not asked, and they would not tell him.