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Captain Notum gives the order and two of his crew unlatch a section of the ship's hull, opening it onto the churning waves of beads just beyond. Shallan leans out with her freehand on the frame; Adolin tries to tug her back. She is wearing Veil's outfit today, in part for the pockets — three of the party's larger gemstones in hers, four in Kaladin's, all of them close to running out. Beyond the waves, close enough that the captain fears hidden rocks beneath the beads, lies a dark coastline crowned by trees of glass: the inverse of Longbrow's Straits.

A sailor clatters down to report. *Your enemies are close now,* Notum translates. The Honor's Path has spent the last hours pushing her mandras to exhaustion and it has not been enough; the Fused are slower than Kaladin can fly, but the ship is slower than they are. The captain's bearded face — glowing faintly — gives no sign of the choice tearing at him: turn over the captives and perhaps save his crew, or set them free and hope the Ancient Daughter escapes.

A hold door opens. Kaladin leads Sylphrena out, her colour muted, clinging to his arm unsteady. Another sailor releases Adolin's deadeye spren from her cabin — for her, one place is as good as another. *Ancient Daughter,* Notum says, bowing his head. *Won't meet my eyes, Notum?* Syl returns. *I suppose locking me away here isn't too different from all those days you spent running about at Father's whims back home.* He turns away.

That leaves Azure, who has been lounging by the stairs in breastplate and cloak with her arms folded. She is not coming. *Doesn't feel right,* she tells Kaladin — she left her men in Kholinar to fight these monsters, and will not do the same again here. She has another thread to chase. She asks Notum if his sailors have cut the bales of cloth to the shapes she requested. The captain does not understand. *You soon will.* She salutes Kaladin lazily — *when you boys next meet the swordsman who taught you that morning kata, warn him I'm looking for him* — and is gone up the stairs. *Zahel?* Adolin asks. *You know Zahel?* — *We're old friends.* Kaladin's salute back is sharper than hers.

A swell of beads crashes through the open cargo doors; sailors with brooms sweep them back toward the opening. *Every moment you delay increases the danger to us all,* Notum tells Shallan, still refusing to look at Syl. *Right.* She takes Adolin by one hand and Pattern by the other; Kaladin links hands with Pattern and Syl; Adolin holds his deadeye. They crowd into the opening, looking at the glass beads below — churning, catching the light of a distant sun, sparkling like a million stars. *All right,* she says. *Jump!*

She crashes into the beads, which roll against her skin and try to overwhelm her with thoughts of trees and rocks. Pattern's hand is pulled from hers. They hit the shallow bottom. She draws in one of her precious gemstones' worth of Stormlight — it sustains her — and fishes from her pocket the bead she chose from the bucket earlier. She feeds it Stormlight; the surrounding beads tremble and pull back from her into the walls and ceiling of a small room. Her glow lights the space. Adolin falls to his knees coughing — *drowning with no water; all we had to do was hold our breath* — and his deadeye stands at his shoulder, blank. Shallan reaches her hand through the bead wall, brushes Kaladin's cloth, and pulls him in still ungrowing — he refused to spend a gemstone. Pattern finds them a moment later, humming happily about the nice pattern of her room.

Syl is not with them. She let go of Kaladin's hand at the surface and rode the jump alone; he frets, but Shallan and Pattern both reassure him that a spren needs no air. They wait inside the manifested room as long as they dare for the Fused to chase the ship past. Then Shallan points. *That way.* The obsidian floor slopes shoreward; she recovers her Stormlight from the manifestation, the beads crashing down around her, and they climb against the current. Where the slope grows too steep to walk she scrambles upward — and a moment after her head breaks the surface, Syl is there on the bank, helping her up.

Syl tells them she saw the enemy fly past overhead from cover in the trees here. They withdraw into the forest of glass: translucent trunks, leaves like blown stained glass, moss drooping in melted-green silken strands that break off in her fingers when she touches them. Overhead, the clouds ripple with the mother-of-pearl light of another highstorm in the world above. Its effect on Pattern and Syl is immediate — her wan colour brightens to blue-white; his head cycles through patterns faster than it has in days. Shallan gives back the Stormlight she has held to the gemstone. Nearby, Syl looks southwest with a wistful, far-off expression. *There's a storm that way too…* she whispers, then shakes herself, embarrassed.

Kaladin digs out two more gemstones — a gamble of two more days' supply, to gain a head start on the hike and to put more land between them and the coast. From here it will be several days across Shadesmar obsidian to reach the lake that represents Thaylenah in this realm, and Thaylen City on its rim. He worries for the honorspren who will face the Fused in their wake; Shallan worries equally about the Fused doubling back to look for them. He Lashes them one at a time — fortunately, his arts work on the spren as they do on humans — and the four of them rise into the dim air and start the last leg of their journey.