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Two days after Sadeas's death, Dalinar walks barefoot through his chambers as the Everstorm comes through a second time. It blows in below him with no thunder of its own, red lightning flashing without rhythm, and he can feel along its passage what it has been doing on its way west — fields scoured, towns blackened, and parshmen waking with eyes lit red. The Stormfather tells him, when he asks, that yes, all of that is real, and that the enemy on the storm now knows him. Navani comes up behind and folds her bare safehand around him from behind as it passes. Where the highstorm is impersonal, this storm feels hateful.

She turns him back into the warm room, sets the conversation, and offers him bed. He stops himself with a hand on the stone. He will not let her in without oaths. The ardent Chanada has gone around the camps making sure no ardent will agree to marry them as siblings-in-law; Navani suggests they go around it.

First he has to tell her something. He cannot remember his dead wife. Her name slides through his hearing. Portraits are smudges. He has memories of events surrounding her — including a city in rebellion, including her being taken — but the actual woman is gone, taken cleanly out of his head along with everything she said to him and the day she died. Navani sets her hand to her mouth and names it: the Old Magic. He nods. He took the boon long ago knowing the cost, and now lives with the cost.

What is left in him from her death is rage and the Thrill. Whatever those drove him to do, the curse has erased. He wants no such gap with Navani. He wants oaths and a witness. They consider Elhokar (too awkward), a foreign Azish priest (too close to declaring himself a heretic), and finally an authority above the ardentia altogether: the Stormfather himself, the largest remnant of the dead Almighty and bonded to Dalinar in any case. Navani grants she would accept a confused dishwasher and laughs at the proposal she has to ask twice for. She kisses him.

Hours later, Dalinar rides one of Urithiru's fabrial lifts up the central shaft of the tower, Adolin and Renarin and Shallan standing across the balcony to leave him room to be nervous, Navani already above. Bridge Thirteen guards the gate now that Bridge Four is too important for door duty. On the open roof he finds Navani in a borrowed bridal crown of jade and turquoise, a red wedding gown beneath it, Elhokar in formal gold beside her — paler since the assassins in his palace — and at the back of the small crowd of Aladar, May, Sebarial and Palona, Kalami and Teshav as notaries, and Kadash himself, of all people, watching from the brazier-light.

Dalinar takes Navani's hands. A wind hits the rooftop and brings the smell of broken branches; the air goes still as if outside time, and the whole sky becomes the Stormfather's face. He pronounces that oaths are the soul of righteousness; he asks Navani whether oaths mean anything to her, and whether the one she means to swear here will hold against the ones she has broken. She accepts both questions. He asks the Bondsmith. Dalinar swears she is his and he is hers and that he loves her. Where most guests get a ring of awespren over their heads, Navani gets the gold rotation of gloryspren instead. Adolin whoops and barrels into hugs; Elhokar kisses his mother on the forehead and goes back down without speaking again to his uncle.

Kadash waits to the end. He tells Dalinar quietly that he has to report all of this to the ardentia and that no amount of old friendship will buy it back. The marriage by a spren is one thing; the talk that the Almighty is dead is another. Dalinar tries to embrace him and is pushed off. A memory rises in him then, almost a reflex — Kadash on his knees, dry-retching, after a thing at Rathalas terrible enough that he left the army to become an ardent the very next day — and Kadash tells him that day need not be dredged up; today is bad enough. Dalinar still presses what he has felt in the visions: that what he touches behind the Almighty is something warmer and older, that Honor was an agent and not God himself. Kadash begs him never to say so again, bows, and leaves. Dalinar is left to wonder what Kadash remembers from that day that he himself does not — and to go down to the midnight feast and his wife.