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*Twenty-six years ago.* Szeth, picking up where the last flashback left off, slips alone from the inland firepits back to his family's homestead in search of his missing sheep Molli. The house is dark. The hanging strings of beads in the doorway rustle in the wind and almost send him bolting; he forces himself past the tree, palm cold against the bark, toward a ruddy fire-glow at the family's worshipped stone.

Three Shin soldiers in studded leather and steel helms are sprawled on the stone. They have built a fire on the packed soil and cooked a meal. The smell — burned, wrong — turns Szeth's stomach before his mind will name it. Empty bottles of his father's wine lie around the firepit. At first he is relieved: these are not stonewalker raiders, they are the Farmer's patrol, sent out to hunt the coastal raid; they should be protecting him. Then he steps closer and sees dark wet ground at the base of the stone, and a cut-free woolly pelt nearby, and at last understands.

The standing soldier — gaunt, deep-set eyes, the one who does most of the talking — challenges Szeth's anger with a hard little philosophy. Szeth hisses *you are they who subtract; the world would be better without people who subtract*, and the Sunken-Eyed Soldier throws it back: you eat the meat soldiers slaughter, you live in houses built from boards soldiers cut; if you pay a man to kill, that does not make you any less guilty. *You subtract too, little splash-colored shepherd. You just do it the cowardly way.* The drunkest of the three is helped off the stone by the third — a quiet, wispy-bearded one — and they stumble away into the dark, leaving Sunken Eyes at the fire gnawing on the last of the meat.

Szeth kneels in the dim light and finds Molli's pelt — the legs still attached — in the grass. He pulls the wool to his face and can smell only blood. Behind him Sunken Eyes suddenly seems to be arguing with someone who is not there — *no, that's enough; I said no* — his voice ragged, his eyes glowing for a moment with a faint red light. Szeth, a blinding heat rising in him, runs at the soldier and is flung aside like a sack. He hits the ground at the foot of the worship-tree and his right hand falls on something *cool and smooth* — the stone his family unearthed earlier in the week. A deep coldness rolls through him, a *terrible void* that suffocates all light and warmth, and for a moment he believes the spren themselves have moved him to act.

He almost does it. He stands over the fallen soldier with the rock in his hand, then stops, looks down, and refuses. He has never hurt another by intent, and he will not today. He calls his own bluff — *this isn't the spren's will; this was my choice* — and asks bitterly why the spren do not strike him down for the blasphemy of holding the stone.

The soldier's hand closes on his throat. Sunken Eyes has reared up snarling, eyes glowing red within, and pins Szeth on his back astride the trough, spittle on the boy's face, nails biting his neck. *Thought to rob me, did you?* Szeth's desperate fingers find the stone again on the soil beside him. He swings. *Slam.* The soldier slumps. He swings again. And again, and again, in time with his hammering heart, his ragged breath, until the warmth covers his hands and arms and he understands that the warmth is blood. He stumbles back, the rock slips from wet fingers, and he stands there feeling at his raw throat and knowing — numbly — that he has subtracted, for the first time in his life.

A soft voice opens in his mind. *Here now, what are you?* It does not return when he waits for it. He waits until morning, when they find him sitting beside the corpse of what had once, ostensibly, been a man, with Molli's wool — legs still attached — laid across his lap.