POV: szeth
Summary
Nine and a half years before the present, Szeth pulls up bloodied in the grand hall of the monastery of Wind, his sword out, his pilgrimage's first leg done. The mosaic floor under his feet bears a picture of Yesoran king of the Heralds and the grout-worn grooves between the tiles, the chapter notes, are running with blood like fullers down the centers of swords. Tuko-son-Tuko, Honorbearer of Wind, is the source of the blood: cut, half on his feet, one hand pressed to a wound he cannot stop. The duel that ended a colleague has taken under five minutes.
He slips in his own blood and falls. Szeth sheathes his sword — uncaring for once that it is bloodied — and gathers the dying man into his lap. *Honor-nimi,* he says, *you fought well.* Tuko spits bloody spittle into his face and gives him, in pieces, the only honest thing he has been told in seven years. He had known the moment Szeth was sent to train with him. He calls Pozen a *damnable stonebreaker* who has marked him for replacement — and warns Szeth: *he'll throw you away too. If you reject him, he will have no power over you. Walk away.*
Then Tuko's eyes go wide and he gasps a stanza in the cadence of a Death Rattle — a climb up the wall of grief toward a light he loves, locked away above, a darkened twin on his back — and the strength leaves him. The Honorblade clangs to the tiles. Szeth tells himself the older man should not have insisted on a duel to the death; the second leg of the pilgrimage allows defeat without death. But the work, the work itself, is done.
The Honorbearers gather. Moss kneels beside him and admits, gently, that he too once had to kill the one before him; he is asked to be the one to inform Szeth's father. Pozen welcomes Szeth into his rightful place — and when Szeth protests that the second pilgrimage, the proving by combat at each monastery, has not yet begun, Dulo slaps him on the back and calls it a formality, Pozen mistakes celebration for confirmation, and Szeth realises with a turn of his stomach that the duel was the only test that ever mattered. *The boy is perfect,* he hears Pozen say at the doorway. *I knew it the moment I found him in that decaying so-called monastery.*
Only Szeth, Sivi, and the corpse remain in the hall. She tells him, without meeting his eyes, that Tuko really had spoken heresy — talk of rebellion, of civil war — and that he had not said as much to Szeth because he had assumed they had sent the young trainee to him for exactly this purpose. *We all have our reasons. Most of us even think they're the right ones.* When Szeth asks how soon he can meet the Voice and finish the second pilgrimage, the Voice answers him from inside their minds — call the boy forward, let him fly, then send him on. *Szeth,* it says directly to him, *come to me at Ayabiza and seek the holy grotto beyond it. There, you will know the full extent of Truth.*