(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Shallan's wig knocked aside, Iyatil runs for the larger room shouting that Shallan is here disguised as Aleen the acolyte. Shallan presses the spanreed at her arm into emergency-hold and turns to bolt for the stairs. Radiant stops her: they have *fooled* these two. The Ghostbloods are dangerous, capable, manipulative — but mortal, and *new* to their spren, perhaps barely a few days into the bond. Radiant rips off wig and mask, calls *Armour*, and stands lit in the doorway. Pattern arrives as a silvery sword; she will not ask Testament to kill again, and Testament forms instead as a cloth-light shield on her left arm. The frightened girl who once killed with a gifted necklace is not who waits in this doorway. She has spoken Truth, and today she is the Radiant she only used to imagine.

She steps into the meeting hall. Lieke flees backward, kicking up purple fearspren; across the room Mraize looks her over and *smiles*, proud of her. He raises his hand ballista and shoots a normal bolt almost as a test; she sweeps it aside with the shield, and feels the new fear she did not know how to name — *what does anti-Light do to a spren-weapon?* They are in unknown territory. Iyatil tears the ballista from Mraize's hands and re-cocks it with the glowing-violet anti-Light bolt; the rest of the cell has been moving the whole time with disciplined precision — two summoning Blades, others producing conventional weapons, Lieke opening a hidden door in the western wall through which the others file in order, no pushing.

Shallan ducks back into the trophy alcove. They have another exit; she cannot just hold the meeting hall and wait for the Windrunners. She steps to the doorway and calls Mraize out: *would the master hunter become the prey, running before the storm?* He turns. *Even the hunter hides from the storm*, he answers — *I will face you when it is time, little knife*. To buy her strike force the seconds it needs, Shallan dismisses Pattern and Testament (she doesn't want them anywhere near that bolt) and offers Mraize a different anchor: she has *seen* Mishram — lightning in her eyes, hair like midnight — and whatever advantage they think they can gain from her is wrong. *We don't have to be enemies*, she tries. *You aren't my enemy*, Mraize says. *You're my obstacle.*

Iyatil shifts — *she's going to shoot*. Shallan dives, expelling all her Stormlight in the move and shaping two illusions, one mid-leap and one held in place. Iyatil picks the right Shallan and looses; Shallan dismisses the armour spren a heartbeat before the bolt takes her in the ribs. The tip is patterned after a Fused weapon: it *injects* the anti-Light under her skin, where it spreads through her with every pulse of blood as a cold that prowls her veins. The wound is the wound — but the anti-Light she must not heal. If she draws Stormlight in to close the wound, the two will annihilate inside her body. Painspren the wrong colour claw up from the stone around her.

Then, blessedly, shouts from the hidden passage. The ceiling at the centre of the room *melts* in a circle eight feet across — Erinor the Stoneward (husband of Darcira) sculpting stone like mud — and a dozen Windrunners pour through. Shallan grips the bolt and meets Mraize's eyes; he, Iyatil and Lieke vanish in a black-violet warp — straight from the Physical Realm into Shadesmar. At least one of them is a corrupted Elsecaller or Willshaper; Renarin would not want her to call them *corrupted*, she knows, but the word is already in her head.

On the far side of the continent, Kaladin is walking a forest road with Szeth toward Shinovar. Szeth has, over the last few hours, told him a story about being a child and finding a rock — in fits and starts, never finishing. Kaladin has not pressed, simply pleased the man is opening up at all. When Szeth trails off this time, he refuses to continue. They reach a switchbacked drop-off and lash themselves into the sky, drifting down over the foliage. Kaladin is bathed in sunlight past its zenith and feels strangely well.

They land on an outcropping above a wide green prairie, and Kaladin sees Shinovar for the first time in his life: rolling hills like ocean swells; lone trees instead of paired root-locked clusters; a herd of distant wild horses; grass that grows mob-thick, like a pike block, instead of the sparser blades back home; and homesteads with flat eastern walls and windows — *unprotected*, he thinks, the way lost children wander a battlefield, because here no storm comes. He thinks aloud that the grass feels as if it could *swallow* him; Szeth answers softly that it will, once he dies — undoubtedly later than they deserve. Syl lands beside him full-sized and trimmed in violet, grinning at the lonely trees standing without a care in the world. Kaladin notices, then, that there are no lifespren in any of it.

*This is wrong*, Szeth says. He is not talking about the buildings. He points to a darkness clinging to a ridge: a region darker than the surrounding stone, with wisps of blackness rising from it that no cloud accounts for. The place ahead is a monastery, one of Shinovar's ten — one per Radiant order, most housing an Honorblade. An Honorbearer candidate must travel each on pilgrimage and master the paired Surge at every monastery that still has its Blade. The one ahead, Szeth says, is the first he lived in but has no Blade — it belonged to Talmut, whom outsiders call Talenelat or Taln, Stonesinew, the Bearer of Agonies. Nin's is also missing — Szeth himself wielded it — and Ishu has lately taken his own back. The darkness, Kaladin says, reminds him of the darkness that wrapped the Kholinar palace when an Unmade lived in it. *You really met one here, in Shinovar?* *Yes*, Szeth says.

Kaladin tries one more time to draw out the story — *the rock, the raid, the horn* — and is told only that *that day was the beginning*. The sun is nearly down. Kaladin does not want to walk into an Unmade at night. They will camp here and visit the monastery in the morning. Szeth does not want a cookfire; Kaladin insists on one anyway. Because he is going to try, tonight, an old standby — stew and a fire — to get this man to keep talking.