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Shelves nearby held a collection of loose gemstones, each glowing brightly. The wealth of Lasting Integrity: gemstones—gathered over millennia—so flawless, so perfect, that they didn’t leak. She’d been told a gemstone like this could, with repeated exposures to storms, absorb far more Stormlight than its size should be able to contain.
She tested this, reaching out with a weak hand toward one of them and sucking in a breath of Stormlight—which streamed to her as a glowing, misty white light.
She immediately felt better: invigorated, alert. Storms, how she’d missed that. Simply holding Stormlight was stimulating. She grinned—not part of the act—then decided to leap to her feet. The ache in her arm vanished; she felt like dancing with joy.
Instead she let Veil take over. This next part needed her—Shallan remained the better actress, but Veil was better at most other espionage skills.
Veil made a show of touching her head where she’d been “wounded.” “What happened?” she asked. “I don’t remember. I was trying to see if I could reach the barrier where the gravity of the plane ran out.”
“You were very foolish, human,” Lusintia said. “You are so fragile! How could you endanger yourself in such a manner? Do you not realize that mortals die if broken?”
“It was in the name of science,” Veil said, reaching to her waist where she’d secured her notebook before climbing. She yanked it out and dropped it in a flurry. At the same time she swept her safehand to the side and dropped a dun emerald in place of a brightly glowing one.
The sleight of hand—performed hundreds of times beneath Tyn’s watch, then perfected on her own—was covered as she stumbled and brushed the shelf, disturbing the many gems and shaking their light. She was able to slip the stolen emerald into her black leather glove.
This all happened in the moment the honorspren focused on her falling notebook. Veil quickly snatched it off the ground and held it to her chest, grinning sheepishly.
“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”
“We would not have you die,” Lusintia said. “Death is a terrible thing, and we…” She trailed off, looking at the shelf and the dun emerald it now contained. “Storms alight! You ate the entire thing? Human, how…”
Another spren, an angry male in uniform, began shoving Shallan out. “That was years’ worth of stored Stormlight!” he exclaimed. “Get out! Go, before you eat anything more! If you fall again, I will have you turned away!”
Veil smothered her grin, apologizing as she stumbled out and met Pattern outside. An embarrassed Lusintia was forced to stay behind and fill out a report on the incident.
“Mmm…” Pattern said. “Thank you for letting me lie. Did it work?”
Veil nodded.
“Mmm. They are stupid.”
“Stupidity and ignorance are not the same thing,” Veil said. “They’re just unaccustomed to both humans and subterfuge. Come on. Let’s make ourselves scarce before someone thinks to search me.”
A YEAR AND A HALF AGO
A banging came on the door, and Eshonai pulled it open and stared out into a tempest. Grand lightning flashes shattered the blackness in brief emotional bouts, revealing Venli, her eyes wide, grinning and soaked, clutching something in two hands before her.
She stumbled into the room, trailing water—which caused their mother to chide her. Jaxlim was in one of her … episodes where she saw the two of them as children.
Venli—seemingly oblivious to anything other than the gemstone—wandered past their mother. She rubbed her thumb on the gemstone, which was about a third the size of her fist.
“Storms,” Eshonai said, pushing the door closed. “You did it?” She set the beam in place, then left it rattling in the wind as she stepped over to Venli.
But … no, the gemstone wasn’t glowing. Was it? Eshonai leaned closer. It was glowing, but barely.
“It worked,” Venli whispered to Awe, clutching the stone. “It finally worked. The secret is lightning, Eshonai! It pulls them through. When I drew close enough right after a strike, I found hundreds of them. I snagged this one before the others returned to the other side.…”
“The other side?” Eshonai asked.
Venli didn’t respond. She seemed like a different person lately, always exhausted from working long nights—and from her insistence on going out in each and every storm to try to capture a stormspren. And now this. Venli cradled the gemstone, ignoring the water streaming from her clothing.
“Venli?” Eshonai said. “If you want my help in bringing this to the Five, you will need to let me see what you’ve done.”
Venli stared at her, quiet, no rhythm at all. Then she stood tall and hummed to Confidence, proffering the gemstone. Eshonai attuned Curiosity and took it. Yes … it did have a spren inside, though it glowed with an odd light. Too dark, almost dusty. Smoky. It was difficult to tell its color through the green of the emerald, but it seemed shadowed, like lightning deep within the clouds.
“This spren is unlike any I’ve ever seen,” Eshonai said.
“Stormform,” Venli whispered. “Power.”
“Dangerous power. This could destroy the listeners.”
“Eshonai,” Venli said to Reprimand, “our people are already being destroyed. Don’t you think that this time, instead of making a snap decision based on songs from thousands of years ago, we should at least try a different solution?”
Rumbling thunder outside seemed to agree with Venli’s words. Eshonai handed the gemstone back, then hummed to Betrayal to indicate what she thought of Venli’s argument. But the rhythm didn’t express how deeply the words cut.
Turning her back on her sister, Eshonai walked to the door again and threw aside the bar. Ignoring both Venli and her mother as they cried objections, Eshonai stepped out into the storm.
The wind hit her hard, but in warform’s armor she barely felt the icy raindrops. She stood in the light spilling from the door until Venli pushed it closed, plunging Eshonai into darkness.
She attuned the Rhythm of Winds and started walking. Humans feared the storms. They always hid indoors. Eshonai respected the storms, and usually preferred to meet them with a stormshield. But she did not fear them.
She walked away from her mother’s house, eastward into the wind. These days, her life had constantly been against the wind. It blew so hard, she barely felt she was making progress. Maybe she’d have been better off letting it steer her.
If she hadn’t fought so much—if she hadn’t spent so much time thinking about her explorations or her dreams—would she have settled into her role as general faster? If she’d doubled down on her raids at the start, would she have been able to shove the humans out of the warcamps before they got a foothold?
Like a rockbud, humans were. Soft at first, but capable of gripping onto the stone and growing into something practically immovable. In this—despite their lack of rhythms—they belonged to Roshar better than the listeners did. If she could truly travel the world, would she find them growing in every crevice?
She neared the edge of the plateau that made up the central heart of Narak, the city of exile. She walked carefully, letting flashes of lightning guide her way. She stepped right up to the edge of the chasm, facing into the wind.
