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Szeth-son-Honor still wears the filmy white that Dalinar has long since stopped requiring of him, and still shaves his head every morning. He cannot tell whether he keeps these things by preference or by habit, and the question of which one is true unsettles him enough that he keeps doing them rather than test it. The voices that ride the shadows of every place he goes have been quiet during the long flight west, but he suspects they are only waiting.

He and Kaladin approach the Misted Mountains at Shinovar's edge, after a night sleeping in a coalition camp at their base. They avoid the northern border, where the Shin have been loosing arrows at anyone approaching, in favour of the southern farmland passes near where Szeth grew up. The pass is the right one; seeing it makes him tremble. They drop to twenty feet off the ground and follow it between the walls of stone, past stonewalker plants curled tight against the wind, and then — abruptly — the country changes underfoot. Soil. Dirt running into the cracks of stone. Mud beside the washes. Here the highstorms finally give out, and the rain stops carrying the cremstone-forming minerals that have shaped every other land Szeth has walked since he left this one.

Mosses on rocks. A few weeds along a wash. Szeth cancels his Lashings and drops the last feet to the ground with a thump, and for the first time in many years his booted feet fall not on blasphemous stone. Two gloryspren appear above him. He kneels by a single dandelion and reaches with trembling fingers toward leaves that do not retreat from his hand. Kaladin alights nearby, surrounded by confusionspren, and asks whether something is wrong with this plant — a sign of what is failing in Szeth's homeland. *No*, Szeth whispers. *It is merely a weed. The most beautiful of weeds.*

His highspren — still unnamed; the distinction is not given lightly, and his has chosen not to give it — speaks to him alone. *This emotion is unfitting of your station. Do not spoil your dignity with base sentimentality. You serve the law.* Szeth forces his hand away from the plant and stands. He does not ask the spren for an explanation. He is Truthless no longer, but he still does as his masters require, and he trusts that in the highspren and in Dalinar he has at least chosen better masters than the last ones. Nightblood, strapped across his back and famously patient for a sword, offers a wry complaint at being ignored, which Kaladin ignores in turn.

Kaladin kneels by the weed, Syl beside him in her human-sized Bridge Four uniform, substantial enough to make the leaves quiver when she taps them. They marvel at it — a plant that holds still, like a painting, like a statue, perhaps a Soulcast one. Kaladin raises his boot and stops it a fraction of an inch above the leaves, trying to make the dandelion flinch. *This is a man*, Szeth thinks, *who pulls back before crushing a weed*. He says it out loud, framed as the question of why a man who pulls back is the man he is — *you have grown into a coward, then?* — and a small skirmish over what truth one is allowed to speak and to whom takes place. Kaladin flies on without stepping on a single plant.

The pass turns and drops, and Shinovar proper opens beneath them: vines down the valley walls, grass across the path, a vast forest along the slope, the great prairie of the lowlands beyond. *These are the normal plants*, Szeth tells Kaladin and Syl as they land beside him. *There are none like those you are accustomed to.* Kaladin bursts an awespren and starts down the path. Szeth follows because this is where he must be, and the whispers, gathered into the shadows now that the sun is at his back, follow with him.