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Shallan rides the seat beside the silent Bluth, her anxiety about the deserters trailing them buried under scholarship. She holds a small leaf out for him on the tip of her finger and explains the way the limbs of rockbuds shatter in the storms, leaves blowing free to take root and build their own shells; he grunts. She has already begun keeping a list of his chull-prods in the back of her sketchbook — twice, pause, once — and she now opens that book to a half-empty notebook of Jasnah's and starts a fresh collection of portraits. The first sketch is the caricature she fears: Bluth hunched like a crab under a too-small white hat. She flips the page and re-draws him idealised — uniform, real spear, eyes to the horizon — and feels a small thing inside her settle.

At the midday halt a thin column of smoke rises from the south. Tvlakv sees it the same moment she does, manages a forced laugh, and tells himself the deserters are letting them be seen because they have decided three wagons are not worth chasing. To distract herself she walks back to the cage on the rear of Tvlakv's wagon and tries to coax names from the two red-and-white-marbled parshmen weaving inside. The door is unlocked — parshmen never run. One looks up and points: *One*, he says of himself; *Two*, of his fellow. Questions about freedom only confuse him; he mouths the word, gives up, ducks back to his weaving, embarrassed at not understanding. She takes a Memory of the pair and walks back, more sure than ever that persuading the Alethi to give up their parshmen before the Voidbringers return — as Jasnah feared — will be nearly impossible without devastating proof.

Then a second column of smoke rises ahead, larger. Tvlakv and Tag argue for cutting east and letting the deserters take whoever is up the road. They are small cremlings, Tvlakv insists; small cremlings stay out of the path of bigger creatures and hope they eat each other. Shallan overrides him. The deserters left an army to live by killing, the highstorm is coming tonight, and on chull-wagons there is no outrunning marching men. She tells him they will make for the second fire. He licks his lips and obeys.

Climbing into the shaded back of her wagon to work, Shallan opens Jasnah's trunk for the dim light of its spheres and unwraps her sliced feet to dab on more knobweed sap. They are already half-healed. *Did you do this?* she asks Pattern. He doesn't know — his kind break differently and never unbreak unaided. She tells him she made herself glow at the fire with Tvlakv the night before by lying, and that Jasnah called the surge of light-shaping Lightweaving — gentler to train on than Soulcasting. She mourns the book Jasnah gave her, swallowed by the sea, and the strange blank companion volume she still does not understand — the Book of Endless Pages. Pattern suggests, gravely, that she try eating one of her spheres; she will not. But the thought reminds her she did not lift the Light by touching it the first time — she drank it in. She sucks in a sharp breath and the Light leaves the sphere in one pulse and floods her, prickling her skin into urgency. She tries to make her dress look whole again and cannot; the Light leaks away unused through her skin. Then she notices the cuts on her feet have shrunk further, and understands the Light is also healing her.

Pattern grows quiet on the wall and finally tells her what he has been holding back: he expects her to kill him. The Knights Radiant of old killed their spren — something to do with oaths he only half understands — and the same will happen to him. *It is no matter*, he says, but it is to her. She protests that she is no Radiant; Jasnah said as much. *You spoke oaths,* he answers, and she freezes. *Life before death*, drifting up at her from a past she will not look at. Lies, he tells her, give her strength; but truth is part of how she grows. She finishes braiding her hair, pockets the few infused spheres she has left into her safepouch as her only weapon, and rebandages her feet. The pain is nearly gone. She knocks on the wood, climbs back to her seat beside Bluth, and looks up the road. The column of smoke ahead has turned thick and black and roiling. *That's no cook fire,* she says. Bluth's read is short: something big is burning, probably wagons; whoever is up there, it did not go well for them.