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Kaladin steps into Roshone's manor with the guardsman's mace in the small of his back and his apocalypse fading by the second. The hallways are packed with the people of Hearthstone sitting in family groups on the floor — alive, dirtied, tired, but alive. He passes the farmer Toravi, who had loomed huge in his memory and is now smaller than him by half a hand, and the man does not even recognise him. Nobody does. The townspeople in the kitchens pull away and whisper *deserter* and *slave brands* and *dangerous*, but never his name. Syl walks the kitchen countertops in a little Vorin havah and notes the fact like a curiosity. In the polished side of a copper pan Kaladin catches his own face: long curling hair, ragged beard, soaked uniform a size too small. Not the homecoming he had built in the long nights of bridge runs — no sergeant's knots, no brother safely returned with him.

Each step through the manor is a step through a memory. The dining nook where he had confronted Rillir and Laral on the night his father was thought a thief. The portrait hallway where he had played as a boy; Roshone never bothered to take down the old paintings. He shoves the mace-bearing guard off when the man tries to herd him again — sidesteps the push so the soldier stumbles past him, then turns and meets the man's eyes until he steps back. *Old sergeant's trick,* he whispers to Syl. Then he hears a moan, and the body that had been five years on a bridge crew turns and finds his father's triage room.

The parlour has been opened up for the wounded. Lirin is kneeling beside a man with a broken arm — greyer, gaunter, otherwise unchanged. He glances up at Kaladin for the soldiers' report, glances back at the splint, then back at Kaladin — and is across the floor with his son in his arms shouting for Hesina. Kaladin's mother comes in with a tray of boiled bandages and drops it where she stands; Syl spins in a ribbon of light around her, laughing. Kaladin cannot. He has carried the words five years and finally has nowhere left to take them. He slides down the wall to sit and tells them, choking, that he had joined the army to keep Tien safe and could barely keep himself. His mother kneels beside him and tells him, gently, that they had had a letter — and a year later a notice that he had died too.

Soup is pressed into his hands, broth with the spice his mother always used, and he eats it sitting among the wounded while Roshone's captain of guard argues quietly with Lirin in the doorway about the slave brands on his forehead — the sas glyph that places the punishment in this princedom, and the shash glyph that is not given for ordinary insubordination. Lirin tells the soldier flatly that Brightlord Roshone can either let this slide or do without his surgeon. Kaladin's mother promises him this is not the place it used to be, that Roshone is gentler now, that they can rebuild as a family — talking to him as if he were the boy who had left.

He turns to the room with a surgeon's eye instead. The wounded around him are wrong for a Voidbringer assault: fractures, concussions, almost no slashes. A natural disaster, not a battle. Whatever the parshmen did when the new storm ripped open their barracks, it was not slaughter. He notices, distantly, that three other men have lived and died in his name since he last sat in this manor — the Amaram-forged soldier, the bitter slave, the captain of Dalinar's guard — and a fourth is being born now, a man who owns the skies and speaks ancient oaths. Five years. Four lifetimes.

He pushes himself off the floor to ask his father something and finds Roshone in the doorway instead. The man wears an out-of-fashion coat and a wooden right foot; his skin sags from his bones from years of exile in this town; the imperious sneer is the same as the day he had set Tien for slaughter. Roshone reaches up and pushes Kaladin's hair off his forehead to see the brands, then asks, almost amused, whether the boy had hit a lighteyes. Kaladin answers yes.

Then punches him: square across the cheekbone in the form Hav had taught him, thumb outside the fist, the follow-through perfect. Roshone drops like a felled tree. *That,* Kaladin says into the silence of the hallway, *was for my friend Moash.*