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Roughly five-and-a-half years earlier, Dalinar jerks awake in a stormwagon's cabin with no memory of what shook him from his bunk, heart pounding, empty bottles scraping under his boots while the back end of a passing storm washes against the walls. Felt knocks — a short, lithe soldier with long drooping moustaches and the pale skin of Shin blood — to tell him the caravan is impatient to leave them behind. Though Dalinar has never said why they came to Hexi, his soldiers have guessed; Felt himself has been this way once before. They pay the caravan-master extra for his silence and split off with their own wagons toward the Valley.

The Hexi flatlands ripple with crusty stormward lichen and flattened leeward grass; the few trees have been bent so far by the wind that their branches almost touch the earth. Small wild chickens burst from one and clump-fly to another. Felt warns him that she did not visit last time and may not visit him either; that he will be entirely in her power inside; that she does not let her petitioners choose the cost. Three hours later he points to a green stripe across the windswept mountainside: a breach pointing north-east, sheltered from highstorms by its foothills, in which plant life has run riot under draped moss and tangled vine and bursting lifespren. They camp at the edge. Dalinar does not wait another night to go in alone.

Trails open in front of him as grudgingly as gate-guards admitting an unknown man. He had hoped the Thrill would meet him here; it does not. He has begun to feel ridiculous — chasing pagan superstition while the highprinces gather to avenge Gavilar — when he hears a boy weeping somewhere in the dark. It sounds like Adolin. More voices join in, people burning. He runs, trips, scrambles up, summons Oathbringer and slashes at the air. Visions come at him: another version of himself out in the Unclaimed Hills hacking parshmen with a grinning skull's face; that version strangling Elhokar and taking the throne; a unified Vorin empire built on burned villages from the Rift onward, his future self laughing atop a pyramid of dead; and somewhere among them Evi, unseen and unrecognised, crying as the fire takes her. He sinks to his knees and lets Oathbringer go; the Blade shatters into mist.

A whispered greeting like rustling trees opens his eyes onto a starlit clearing. The Nightwatcher is a dark green vapour in the rough shape of a crawling person, only her smooth feminine face properly formed, her long body weaving away among the trunks like an eel. Tendrils sprout from her head and reach out to cold-touch his cheeks. She greets him as a child of Honor and a child of Odium alike, and asks what boon he wants. She offers him renown, wealth, skill, beauty, an army of followers, even a Blade that weeps darkness. He whispers something he had not meant to ask for: forgiveness. Her tendrils flinch back from his face. Forgiveness, she objects, is no boon. He pleads with her anyway. Can he ever be forgiven at all?

A second voice, more like tumbling stones than rustling wind, stops her. At the clearing's far edge stands a matronly woman whose skin is the colour of darkwood bark, in a brown dress whose hem melds with bark and grass. The Nightwatcher backs away from her instantly, complaining like a child who was about to grant a blessing. Her mother strokes her misty hair, tells her the boon is past her, and bids Dalinar to follow her. She walks into the underbrush; vines lean toward the hem of her dress as she passes. She has not, she says, come personally for one of them in centuries. The Nightwatcher holds court here on her behalf because it helps her understand them.

She refuses his demanding questions and asks her own. He has asked the ardents for forgiveness and got what was crafted for him in answer. He has been told to look to Honor, and Honor does not answer. He stops walking and tells her he is doomed: the dead weep when he closes his eyes; they are driving him mad. She considers him, the Nightwatcher coiling in and out from around their legs — and as she does, Dalinar realises that he is not seeing the whole of her at all. The vines of her hem curl down into the soil. The woman in front of him stretches off forever in every direction.

This will be his boon, she tells him. She will not make him into the man he could become; she will neither lend him talent nor steal his compulsions. She will instead give him a pruning — a careful cut to let him grow — and the price will be heavy. He agrees to anything. She warns him that in doing this she is putting a weapon into the enemy's hand, and a dangerous one. Everything must be cultivated, she says. What she takes from him will grow back in time. It will serve her, in the end, to have her hand on a part of him even if he becomes one of the enemy's. She controls everything grown and nurtured, and that includes the thorns. The trees descend on him then. Branches and vines push into his eyes, his nails, his mouth and ears, his pores, hanging him on living wires that pass through him without pain. She tells him she will draw what she means to draw out of his mind, and along with it she will take *her*. He stops her, hung from her own forest, long enough to ask whether *her* means Evi. Yes — every memory of her, she answers. Will he forbear? He closes his eyes. He never had any claim on her. *Do it*, he tells her.

He crawls out the next morning to men running with water and bandages he does not need; they prop him under the stormwagon's shadow while Malli — Felt's wife — writes ahead to the ship by spanreed. He is very tired, but the curse, he tells Felt, is for him alone. When he searches his memory, the years of conquest are clear and the years of drink are clear, but no face remains for the wife whose name he cannot now even pronounce. She has been taken cleanly. So has the grief that had been driving him to drink with her, and the bottle he can break himself the way he has broken drunks under his command. He still feels sorrow for failing Gavilar; the Almighty's work is not done. Something else feels missing that he cannot quite place, beyond the rustling leaves where he thinks he should still hear *something*, but cannot. He stands, has Malli send for the king, asks for battle maps for the Parshendi reprisal — and tells the sailors at the dock to bring back, while they are in port, an Alethi-language copy of *The Way of Kings*. He would like to have it read aloud to him again. The last time it had been, he was not in his right mind.