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Continuing minutes after the previous flashback, eleven-year-old Szeth crouches behind his father Neturo in the homestead's dance ring, peeking out at the small new stone the wind has uncovered in the packed earth. He loves the family stone. He had not wanted a *new* thing. He preferred quiet afternoons of bleating sheep and his mother's stories by the firepit, and now this thing he found is going to *change* everything. Elid asks practically whether they should call the Stone Shamans; Father only answers *Depends. Depends.* He is patient in the way Father always is, his beard tied with its green ribbon and his three splash-ribbons matching, his customary tall reed hat shading him. He has all the answers. Always.

A single stone is a blessed anomaly, Neturo explains; two might mean the spren have *chosen* this region — in which case the shamans will set the district aside and watch it for years, and the family will have to tear down the homestead in case it sits on holy ground. Elid doesn't want to move. Szeth says only that if it is right, they must — and then his mother Zeenid comes hurrying along the path between hills, the audacious green skirt that is her splash whipping against the white apron, curly light-brown hair around her head like a cloud. On her shoulder she carries one of Clearmount's shovels — a relic Soulcast by an Honorbearer from metal that has never touched rock, gifted to them. Szeth gapes. The shovel can only mean one thing.

*Merely a quick relocation*, Zeenid says cheerfully. She has borrowed the shovel without explaining; she will pull the rock up, dig it in a few hundred yards away, let a rainfall reseat the earth around it, then tell everyone. She has brought gloves so no one's bare hand will touch the stone. Szeth is horrified — *that is the same thing!* — and turns to his father, who only scratches his beard and tells him that he, the one who found the rock, gets to decide. Move the stone, or move the homestead. Either is acceptable. Szeth objects that they hate the stonewalkers for how they treat rock; Neturo corrects him gently — *they don't know the right way of things, they aren't evil for living among stone*. The raiders are evil because they *choose* to be.

Szeth looks at the house, then at the dance ring, then up at his parents' carefully neutral faces — and chooses to move the rock. All three of them relax, and he feels a quiet, shameful resentment at having been given a *choice* that wasn't one. They had wanted this answer; he had given them what they wanted because he sensed it. If the choice had been a real one, they would have said so. If their wish was right, they should have just *told* him. Why give him fault when they could have spared him?

Mother pulls on her gloves and digs. Each scrape of the shovel against the sacred stone makes Szeth wince — that metallic sound is *not natural*. He hopes the rock will turn out to be too big to move; in the end it is the size of his hand, only eight inches across and dull grey. Molli the ewe rubs against him, sensing his tension, and he grips her wool. Elid points out that Mother has scraped the stone; Mother says no one will see the scrape once it is buried again. Elid asks what the Farmer would do if he found out, and Neturo laughs and says it would probably cost them some cake. Devotion, he tells his shocked son, is something they *choose* to make, and the *shape* of that devotion is theirs to decide. The Stone Shamans share the spren's teachings, Zeenid adds, but we interpret them. What they are doing today is reverent enough for her.

Szeth wonders, not for the first time, whether this is why they live outside Clearmount — and whether his parents are heterodox or whether *he* is broken for asking. Then the horns sound: raiders on the southern coast, stonewalkers coming inland. Father whispers a prayer to the spren of their family stone and orders the sheep gathered and driven toward Dison's Valley on the far side of town; the Shin Farmer's troops are there and the family will be safe inland. *But this!* Szeth says, gesturing to the new rock. Mother, suddenly resolved, takes it up in her gloved hands. All four of them go still and look toward the family stone, half-expecting to be struck down. Nothing happens; his parents slowly relax, and Szeth understands that even *they* had not been certain. Zeenid hides the rock in a gnarled tree-root nook near the house, covers it with leaves, and goes to return the shovel. Father and Elid go to the sheep. Szeth hugs Molli and wishes the day had never begun.