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Out on the stone-gathering plain west of the warcamp, Kaladin hoists rocks onto the wagon while Rock and Teft hunt the lee of boulders for knobweed reeds — the spindly stalks whose sap is the antiseptic his father taught him to milk. Syl (whom only Rock can see — a Horneater inheritance from the Peaks) zips ahead of Rock to lead him from one stand to the next. Kaladin smuggles each handful into hidden bundles tied beneath the wagon bed.

In a chasm bottom on a break the three of them mill drop-by-drop. Rock tells his story. He was not a slave to his lord but family — umarti'a, the relatives of a nuatoma who serve him. He came down from the Peaks at his nuatoma's side and was there the day Sadeas killed the chief in a duel for his Shards. Rock cooked Sadeas one meal afterwards — enhanced with chull dung in the soup, the bread, the pork-steak garnish, and a chutney for the buttered garams. Sadeas's scorched tongue did not notice. The next morning Rock was sent to the bridge crews. Teft laughs himself onto his side and owes him a drink.

Teft presses Kaladin for his own story. Kaladin offers only the bones: he killed a lighteyes in Amaram's army, was thanked for it by someone important, and discovered that lighteyes do not react well when you turn down their gifts. The argument turns. Teft argues that tradition says any common man who kills a Shardbearer becomes a lighteyes and walks away with the Plate — that is the way of it. Kaladin answers flatly that tradition is the pretty box lighteyes use to wrap up their lies; that there is no finest among them, that they are all the same; that Rock's nuatoma was lucky to die at the duel before he could discover how he had been tricked out of the Plate. The argument lapses. Nomon sets in the west and Mishim — the small green moon — rises in the east, and they return to the reeds.