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On the seventh evening of Szeth's pilgrimage, camped on a hillside near the Dustbringer monastery, Kaladin sets out his vegetables, lies back to look at the stars, and finally lets himself feel — rather than merely admit — that he will not be making it back in time for the contest. The realisation arrives as peace rather than grief. The champion was always going to be Dalinar himself. He uses the cloak Dalinar gave him as a pillow, gets out his flute, and plays the single tune Wit taught him, slowly, while his armour spren dance in the air to the music and Syl curls up beside him glowing softly. The songs become a way to remember the dead — Tien, Dallet, Teft, Nalma, Goshel, and the rest — without taking their loss back into himself as his fault.

Nale stomps past, declares he hates the song, and proclaims that a Soulcast ration bar is a perfect food. Szeth settles on a nearby rock and waits, pointedly, for stew. Kaladin gets to work — and something in Wit's voice in his head tells him *this is the listening part, not the talking part.* Over the bowl that follows, Szeth tells him he is caught between two choices: obey Nale and keep killing former colleagues like Moss, or break his oaths. Kaladin tells him about Goshel, a slave who turned out to have been a soldier — discharged for refusing an order to burn a village — and about the rebellion that killed him. He stops short of giving advice and lets Szeth take a second bowl and walk off thinking.

The instinct to chase after him, plan for him, fight for him, is so strong Kaladin almost stands up. He recognises the impulse as the same one that broke him after Tien's death and chooses, deliberately, to let Szeth make his own choices. Syl feels something shift in the bond. A starlit figure in the shape of a man drops down beside the stewpot and introduces himself, very politely, as 12124 — a young highspren who would like therapy. He confesses he is bad at giving commands and worse at being a proper highspren, and that he is letting everyone down, particularly *121*, Nale's. Kaladin performs the same trick on him: ask questions, listen, decline to provide answers. By the time he vanishes, the highspren is admitting he feels better and that the work consists mostly of being told things he already knew. He also lets slip mention of *the dissenters*, refuses to explain, and goes.

Kaladin cooks a second bowl and goes looking for Nale, who hovers cross-legged fifty feet up, and hesitates — he does not want to feed his captor. *He has become your enemy,* the Wind tells him in his ear. She explains why Nale hates the flute song: it is one of her own rhythms, the one Cephandrius used to bring the Heralds to Roshar from Ashyn, and part of Nale wishes they had never come. Then she asks more of Kaladin: the Heralds are the last pieces of Honor, siphoned off and held apart, more important than he can know, and she needs him to save them rather than let them die. She shows him — faint impressions, not visions — a man pulling rubble aside in soot and blood to reach the trapped, a swordsman in black bleeding from one hand and refusing to let the cowering be taken, a hero who stood for thousands of years. *Weathered,* she says of him now. *Time and I both wear away what we love.* Syl takes his hand. She saw it too.

Szeth runs up before Kaladin can deliver the second bowl and points northeast. Low on the horizon, easy to miss until you have seen it: a river of stars in the night sky, a stream of light flowing toward the final monasteries. Syl knows it for what it is. All the spren of this land have gathered. Nale lands beside them. *Your gods have gathered to witness your decisions, Szeth-son-Neturo,* he says, *and the salvation of this land.* Whatever answers there are lie at the end of that river.

Across the world in Shadesmar, Shallan has Glys and Tumi build her an obsidian ledge modelled on a happier memory — the night she and Adolin saw a starspren together. She is trying to let the small points of light guide her instead of the dark spaces between them. Renarin and Rlain step into the vision with her and settle suspiciously close on a nearby outcrop, the starspren coiling overhead. Shallan turns the meeting to business: Renarin has antagonised Mishram into telling him *I showed you so you can find me — so I may destroy you.* Rlain takes the threat for what it is — the offer is the only lead they have, and they are not catching the Ghostbloods otherwise. They have to find the prison and move it before Mraize does.

Rlain and Renarin try to remember whether the visions Mishram has been seeding showed anything unusual. Rlain sat through the conversation in which Bridge Four picked him because he was the most disposable. Renarin was being bullied in the Kholinar palace and rescued by Adolin — a memory that hurts now in a new way because he no longer wants protection, he wants to be his own person. Shallan thinks of the vision she chose to walk out of, the day she killed her mother, and wonders whether she missed a clue. Then Glys tells Renarin that his father and aunt have reached an important moment — the day Mishram was originally captured — and the conversation slots together. The capture is near the death of Honor. It is all linked. Shallan finishes the thought aloud: Odium fears Mishram because she could kill him and take his place. She is a viable rival for his power. Renarin stands. They need to join his father's vision now. Mraize and Iyatil will be there. Be alert.