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Teft wakes in the hidden sanctuary inside Urithiru feeling like a sodden sack, certain at first that he must have slipped back to moss — and hating himself for it. The joy of Dabbid and Rlain when they see him awake convinces him otherwise. He has not broken. For once a beating laid him in the gutter through no fault of his own, and his streak of clean months is still intact. He sits up to eat the cold soup Dabbid brings and takes a quiet stock of the room.

Kaladin is on the floor, ceding the bench to Teft and looking hollowed out by whatever fevers he passed through. He has lost the Ancient Daughter somewhere in the fighting and cannot hear her. Teft's own honorspren, Phendorana, primly nods that she went unconscious with him but is here and intact; she explains to Kaladin that, since his Surgebinding still works, his bond holds — the Ancient Daughter is likely close to where he lost her, even if she has lost herself for a while. Teft needs Regrowth from Lift every ten hours or so to keep from slipping back into the coma. Dabbid can now talk; the others have chosen not to press him on the long silence — a man can keep his own counsel, and Dabbid showed up when it mattered.

Lift arrives with Rlain, wrinkles her nose at the soup, then hops up beside Teft and tops him up with Stormlight so he will not nod off in his bowl. Rlain reports that there is no news from the queen: Navani has been isolated with her scholars for over two weeks now. Every count of their situation in the tower is worse than the last — the Fused hold the corridors, the Radiants sleep guarded, the tower spren is dying under the slow corruption of the shield — and the five of them are the only people in Urithiru still moving freely.

Kaladin sets the question that has been turning in him. He is not broken, he says, and he is not giving up; he is only very tired. They cannot fight an army with two half-recovered Radiants whose powers are temperamental and whose spren are partly missing. The unknown final node keeping the shield up cannot be guarded against Odium's full force, and if they break it the tower falls anyway. So should they keep fighting? Is his father right that they make things worse the longer they refuse to lay it down?

Teft answers obliquely, by telling them — for the first time, in his own voice — how he got his own father killed. He grew up in a small place called Talinar that smelled of flowers, where travellers from out of town slowly drew his parents and their neighbours into a secret cult called the Envisagers, who chanted blasphemies in spheres-on-masks robes at their initiation and pushed their members to do increasingly terrible things to try to force themselves to become Lost Radiants. At eight, frightened, he went to the citylord to ask him to run the worst out of town. Sixth nahn should have been high enough that the worst they would face was exile. It was not. His mother was already dead by then. His father was executed because of what Teft told. Teft left for the army at the first chance he could and carried it for decades — and yet, he tells Kaladin, it was what his parents taught him about Stormlight that let him recognise what he was seeing the night Kaladin lay dying and gave him a sphere. In the end his family won. They were right.

He turns the lesson on the question. They cannot see the future the way Renarin does; they have to do what looks best from where they stand and live with it. What looks best, to him, is rescuing the captive Radiants before the enemy decides what they are for. They settle a tentative shape for the plan together: Lift can wake the others, but she will need a chull-load of food and they will be in no shape to fight; Rlain proposes the infirmary window — break the glass and drop, and the Windrunners may catch their powers again outside the tower's influence. Teft volunteers to go first, on the grounds that they can watch and see whether he flies. Kaladin notes the very many assumptions in that and asks for more time to consider. He still wants Navani's input first; Rlain thinks he can disguise his listener tattoo and substitute for one of the Venli's people who are sometimes assigned to carry food to her rooms. Until then, they wait, and do nothing rash.

The conversation turns lighter. Teft catches himself smiling — smiling that the squad is still together, that he stayed for Kaladin when it mattered, that seven months on he is still clean and the colour has not left the world. Phendorana grins at him too, and he mutters that she has always been right. Teft was worth saving.