The slave quarters blistered in the sun. Paint peeled in long curls like an apple’s skin. Kestrel noticed, with queasy misgiving, that a little house lay near the slave quarters on each farm. At first, when she went with soldiers to forage for provisions to fatten the army’s supplies, she hadn’t known what the little houses were for. There had been no such house on her father’s property in Herran.

One day, she saw Arin see a small house. His eyes tightened. His expression went bleak.

She knew then that the houses had been for children. The memory came unwillingly, sticky and slow. She had to drag it out. When she did she understood that the knowledge had been the sort of thing she had once tried to unknow.

It had been the practice to take a baby from its enslaved mother once it was weaned and sell it to a neighboring farm. The mother would be distracted from her work, went the Valorian wisdom. Meanwhile, her master would purchase other children from other farms. These children forgot that anyone but their owners could lay claim to them, and were raised in small houses by an elderly slave. By now, such a child could be as old as ten years.

It had been commonly done in the countryside. In the city, not always. Some owners prided themselves on allowing their slaves to keep their children. Kestrel had once seen a Valorian lady coo over a Herrani child. The tiny girl had wobbled where she stood in the center of the parlor. Kestrel, who had come for tea, hadn’t noticed the girl’s mother at first, then had followed the toddler’s gaze to see a uniformed woman waiting in a shadowed alcove.

Kestrel’s father had made clear that there would be no slave children on his property. If babies were born, they were soon sold. None were purchased.

Each little house on each farm was a horror. Before—for years—she had let her mind close seamlessly, like an egg, around this wrong and other wrongs. They happened every day. It was life. But not her life.

Hers, an inner voice—sinister, upsetting—had sometimes disagreed.

Not hers.

Hers.

The words echoed now with the rhythm of Javelin’s hooves.

Kestrel could say that she’d learned that one’s life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.

The sky was frosted with stars. Kestrel found Arin seated near a fire, squinting as he retooled someone else’s leather armor. A buckle had come off.

“Can you see well enough?” She remained standing.

“No.” He pushed an awl through a strip of leather. “But there’s no time for this by day.” The army pressed as rapidly west as it could, though not as quickly as Kestrel would have liked. Roshar had warned against a forced march. Weary soldiers make for lost wars. Her father had often said the same.

Kestrel tipped her head back. The night glowed. “How do you make a mirror?”

Surprise tinged Arin’s voice. “Do you want a mirror?”

“No. I just wondered how.”

“You silver glass. It’s not something I’ve done.”

She turned in a half circle to look toward the western constellations. Her boots released the scent of bruised grass. “Before, people must have used polished metal.”

“Prob ably.”

“Or bowls of dark water. The sky looks like a mirror, if a mirror was a bowl of black water.”

There was a silence. Kestrel took her eyes off the stars and looked at him. He’d set aside the armor and was turning the awl in his fingers. He flickered orange and red in the light of the low fire. Quietly, he said, “What are you thinking?”

She was hesitant to say.

He came to stand next to her.

“Arin, after the conquest, what was it like for you?”

“I’m not sure you want to know.”

“I want to know every thing about you.”

So he told her.

The stars, too, seemed to listen.

They left the wheatlands. The soil became loose. Fresh water, seldom. On the fifth day out of Errilith, however, they reached a stream and replenished the water barrels stowed in the supply wagons.

Kestrel watched Roshar approach Arin as he curried his horse. “Here.” The prince thrust something at him. “Do us all a favor. You’re filthy.” Roshar looked him over. “I think there’s still dried blood behind your ears.”

It was a cake of soap. Arin appeared faintly startled, as if he lived in a world where soap hadn’t been invented. He broke the round between his hands and offered Kestrel half.