(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Szeth walks the last stretch toward the Lightweaver monastery beside Nale, with Kaladin and Syl behind. He has never had much affinity for Lightweavers — he disliked, in training, the way they made comedy out of truth and worshipped lies — but as the path slopes down into the ravine he wonders whether reshaping truth into something you can live with is just *what people do.* Glancing back at the blue uniform and the black uniform of the two men arguing behind him, he feels pulled between them and wonders whether life itself is partial truths pulling against each other. Sivi had tried to teach him as much; he had always refused her.

On his back, Nightblood is unusually quiet, then asks if he is all right. *I felt something from you. You hurt.* Szeth tells the sword he always hurts and does not deserve peace. Nightblood worries the matter further — *am I evil? You said you wouldn't kill anymore. Killing innocents is evil, isn't it?* — and Szeth, gently, explains Nale's philosophy from inside: that humans cannot be cleanly sorted; an instrument may kill an innocent for what it thinks is a higher law and never be sure it was right.

The ravine opens out, and the monastery sits cut into the cliff face above a thin brook. There is no city here, only a few keepers' houses; he checks them and finds them all empty. As he heads back toward the door, Kaladin catches his arm one more time. Szeth stops long enough to make Kaladin feel foolish for it, hands him the half-pack of Honorblades he has been carrying, and steps inside. Nale holds Kaladin at the threshold: *He must finish the pilgrimage without your help.*

The hall inside is three storeys tall, dim except for a single shaft of sun from a skylight above. Standing in that column of light, in rows of five by six, are thirty identical Shushes — illusions, Szeth realises after a moment, not women. From within them the voice of Moss-son-Farrier comes — thrown sound, a Lightweaver trick. He greets Szeth warmly and refuses to duel. *You think I'd have any kind of chance?* This monastery does not pick its bearer by combat anyway; it picks by puzzle. Twenty-nine of the figures are subtly *imperfect*. One conceals Moss himself, wearing the perfect face. The challenger must walk around the circle, pick the right one, strike through the eye, and escape with the Blade. Touch any illusion and the trial is forfeit. After this challenge, Moss will not speak again.

Szeth dismisses his Blade and trusts the room not at all. He trusts his sword arm against anyone but a Herald; he does not trust his mind, not with old voices in the eaves. But he begins.

Far to the east, Venli walks point through the chasms of the Shattered Plains. She has never come in this way before; childhood with Eshonai taught her to jump or climb down from above. Twenty of her people are behind her — her Urithiru companions Dul, Mazish, and Shumin among the original listeners, with Leshwi and her Heavenly Ones also following — and behind them, five chasmfiends led by the great Thundercloud, the first of his kind to decide he was done with war.

She attunes Peace, then catches herself and questions the habit. Walking past a length of crem-coated stick that had once been wood — rotted hollow inside its stone shell — she lets the metaphor land. The story she has been telling herself about her own childhood, that she was *forced* to memorise songs while her sister played, is a crust over a sweeter truth she has been letting rot. She loved the songs. She loved her mother. The resentment she nurtured was never about the work, and her sister was always doing what the people needed. She replaces the brittle memory with kinder ones and attunes Awe at the bright, vibrant ecosystem around her.

Thude catches up to her, lantern-gem in hand, and asks if she is sure of this course; the Everstorm is ahead of them. *Likely parked,* Venli says — the new god moves it where he wants it — and reminds him what Rlain has sent: a strange ten-day contract between the human king and Odium for the territory they take. Humans and singers, again, are killing each other over Narak. Thude mourns the blood spilled for *barren stone* and Venli apologises for everything. He says he keeps thinking Eshonai might walk back into camp; when Venli first returned he thought, for a second, she had. She tells him gently that she has seen Eshonai's body. Then Timbre thrums something curious inside her: Eshonai was not Timbre's anymore at the end. She cast her stormform off. She was herself. *We can fight him.*

Venli argues that perhaps they should help with the battle ahead; Thude cuts her off. *We will not fight.* The listeners are barely a thousand adults; the chasmfiends not much more than a hundred and dwindling. He has chosen to trust her again, but she does not lead them. And — making it harder for her — he asks her to *let go*. She regrets. They all regret. An evil god was bent on the people's destruction. He is trying not to hate her. She would help them both if she could move on. She bows to the wisdom of it, agrees they will not fight, and keeps walking inward under the chasm slit, where the dark and the writhing plants are the only cover that will let her hear the strange tone at all.