(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Far out on the Shattered Plains, past the last Kholin scout perimeter, on a plateau no human army has ever fought over because it is too small and too far east, a man in the bright motley of the king's Wit sits on a stone in the dark. He has walked out from the warcamp and out past the patrol lines without anyone seeing him, which is a thing he is very good at doing when he does not want to be seen. He has not lit a lamp. He does not need one. The stars are out — the strange winter constellations of late Tanat — and the night is so still that the wind off the Plains barely moves the grasses at his feet.

He looks east, toward the part of the Plains that no Alethi map shows. He pulls a small wooden flute from inside his motley. He turns it once in his fingers, tests the lip, sets the mouthpiece to his teeth. He has not played it in a long time. He speaks aloud, conversationally, to nothing the eye can see. *Can you feel it?* he asks the open night. *Something just changed. I believe that, just now, we may have a chance.* And then, with the practiced ease of a man who has been more things in his time than most men have lifetimes to be, he plays. The notes are small and intricate and not, anyone in the warcamps would have agreed had they heard them, from anywhere on this world. They carry farther in the still air than they have any right to.

Back in the warcamps, a bridgeman captain sleeps in a fresh bunk in the Kholin household guard barracks with a faint glow steaming softly off his skin even though he has spent no Stormlight in his sleep. A highprince sleeps in his complex with the pieces of his Plate arrayed beside his bed and his son's Blade — not his own anymore — propped against the wall. A young scholar sleeps on the deck of a ship moving east through the Reshi current with a fabrial she does not yet understand hidden in her safehand pouch. Far away, on plateaus the Alethi have never crossed, the Listeners sing in a rhythm none of their grandparents would have recognised. And Wit keeps playing the small flute into the still dark, and somewhere very far away — somewhere a long road and several centuries away from this stone — something at last, in the long silence of the world, begins to answer.