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Light bleeds from the corners of the cube as Mraize speaks. Veil kneels with it on the deck of the barge, and the present staggers under her. She has done this before — knelt with a corner-lit cube in her hands — and she catches herself expecting the top of it to be dimpled. The wrong place to expect a memory: she should be seeing the tarp, not her father's gardens. Veil fades into Shallan, who feels the old knotted blank her mind keeps growing flowers over, the years before her mother's death she does not have whole. She had spoken oaths to Pattern as a child; she had struck down her mother with a Shardblade; she had held a cube like this. *Remember,* Veil tells her. *Remember.* The sound coming out of the cube dissolves into separate syllables her mind cannot piece into Alethi, and the deck lurches beneath her. She forces Veil back in control just in time to catch Mraize mid-sentence — *been careful, not to attract attention?* — and improvises an answer.

The call settles. Veil reports the envoy has landed and has weeks of caravan ahead of it. Mraize asks after the other Radiants; she declines, and he concedes — wiggle room, she notes. She floats the bait: *some odd spren have been watching us, the wrong colour, like they'd been corrupted.* Mraize is interested. Sja-anat is important to him; she had promised him a spren to bond and he is still waiting. He assigns her a secondary mission — watch closely for these spren, make contact if she can. Veil tries to extract information about the cube in trade; Mraize, amused, lectures her on hierarchy, calls her *little knife*, names her relationship to her *babsk*, and refuses. She accepts the rebuke and notes the lesson. Then Mraize makes the mistake: *watch for any signs of these corrupted gloryspren.* She had carefully not told him *what kind*. Veil is insufferably pleased with herself. The light fades. Shallan sets the cube back in the chest, takes another Memory of it, and locks the lid. Beryl is the spy.

Ashore, Adolin meets Godeke's find. The unwelcoming caravan camped outside the waystop is a band of brown-skinned, black-haired humans in coarse Makabaki cloth with braided waist tassels, the camp dark and lit by neither flame nor Stormlight, cudgels in plain sight and edged weapons concealed among their goods. Adolin reads the clothing as southeastern Makabaki — Marat or Tukar — and confirms the accent when one of the men curtly tells him in broken Alethi to *go away*. The shadows on their faces lie wrong in the Shadesmar light; their eye sockets are pits. Archinal, Godeke's cultivationspren, wrings her hands and warns him not to assume earthly geography; Adolin doesn't believe it. There is no good way for a human caravan from his world to be in Shadesmar without a Radiant to bring them through, and the Tukari are led by a man claiming to be a god who is actually a Herald. His father is planning to drive the Emul singers south into Tukar as a hammer and anvil. Coincidence felt unlikely.

On the way through the market with his soldiers, Adolin had stopped beside an inkspren bookseller's open stall, because Maya had stopped, transfixed by a Cryptic standing silent outside it — the same kind of broken, scratched-out spren that she is. The shopkeeper's terse story has the Cryptic as his business partner only ten years ago, found a year past sitting alone on an island far to the east, insisting on walking this direction until he set up shop where she stopped. *New deadeyes,* he says, blaming humans, blaming the return of Radiants. Adolin retreats with her holding his arm, troubled.

Back under the tarp on the barge, Shallan has been sketching by the light of gemstones — the cube four times over, painstakingly. Pattern sits down beside her, sees the four sketches, and asks if she is well. She tells him Beryl is the spy: there is a scratch near a corner of the cube and that face is on a different side today, and her sketches are eerily accurate. She is surprised by her own relief — she could not have stomached it being Vathah or Ishnah. Veil grumbles that this feels too easy, too clean, that they should question every piece of information that arrives, but does not press it. Shallan sketches the cube a fifth time, this time with dimples on the top, and asks Pattern whether he remembers her using one of these as a child. He doesn't. He tells her, gently, that something else looks out of her eyes when he tries to talk about her past — something new, and she teases him into it sometimes only to have it look back at him. *There's another truth,* she whispers, and squeezes her eyes shut. Veil takes over and goes out to be near Adolin because Shallan needs to be near him — but holds the fear in and does not say it, because she will not risk feeding Formless.

Adolin is already in front of the barge. The figure speaking with Unativi is Notum, in a buttoned shirt and trousers instead of his captain's uniform. He takes the meeting like a man being asked to admire an insane rant: a diplomatic mission, Adolin says; letters of introduction from kings and queens; an alliance with Lasting Integrity. Notum frames it as a thief asking to normalize relations after stealing the king's beloved daughter — the honorspren hold the new Radiants responsible for the Ancient Daughter's bond and for the rebirth of an abomination they remember as eight genocides. The Stormfather, he tells Adolin, no longer commands the honorspren; they regard him as wounded by Honor's death and his agreement to be Dalinar's bond as the wound speaking. *Your people are criminals,* he says, and walks toward what is plainly his own small caravan. Adolin catches him with the suggestion that a respected captain might vouch for them, and Notum freezes — Adolin had missed the obvious. Notum is not on leave: he was removed from command and spent five months in prison for releasing Syl when capturing her, demoted to the lowest honorspren rank, and sentenced to walk the empty road between this waystop and Lasting Integrity for two centuries. He may see the fortress; he is not permitted in. He asks only one thing back — did they save the Bondsmith? Adolin gives him the honest answer: his father had not ultimately needed them, but Shallan and Kaladin had turned the battle when they arrived. Notum nods and continues on toward his eternal exile.

Adolin is left to help unload onto a camp outside the town, lost in thought. If Notum — the embodiment of honorspren propriety — has been treated like this for doing the right thing, what could he possibly hope for at Lasting Integrity? He had been useless at Thaylen City. The world was about gods and Radiants now. The best he could do was accept it, and find another way to be useful. Somehow, he would make the honorspren listen.