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Kaladin stands in Roshone's hallway with the citylord sprawled at his feet and three guards drawing on him. His father shouts at him; his mother begs the soldiers not to strike. Syl lands on his shoulder with hands on her hips and notes drily that the man probably deserved that. The perspective of it crashes down on him — he has met real evil and Roshone does not compare — and he holds up a hand to his mother, calls the blow paid debt, and orders the guards to stand down. They glance at each other; they stand down. He apologises to Roshone in the same breath he asks the captain what happened to the town's parshmen — and when Roshone yells at the soldiers to attack instead, the lighteyed captain quietly sheaths his sword and tells his lord they should pretend the punch never happened.

Kaladin walks them all upstairs to the library. When nobody follows, he sweeps his arm out and Syl forms into a dew-covered Shardblade in his hand; he spins her and rams her into the floor, and his eyes bleed to blue. The room freezes. Roshone's eyes bulge; his father only lowers his head and closes his eyes. The guards file up after him. Through Aric and the captain he gets the parshman story: the barracks was locked from outside, the side ripped clean away during the new storm, and the creatures gone by morning without harming anyone. Taller, armored-looking, eyes that may have glowed red. They did not bother Hearthstone; the town was beneath their attention. He orders maps, horses, and a spanreed to Tashikk so he can reach Dalinar, and tells Roshone to his face that the new storm will return, the Voidbringers have come, and the cheating murdering man before him will have to stand up and lead these people because there is nobody else.

A walk down to the parlour first, with Syl chatting in his ear about how half his spears have probably been female and how some older spren have four genders instead of two because humans never imagined those ones — and an aside about a girl in a damp havah he turns to find at the library door. Laral is no longer the lighteyed youth he had pictured saving from this house; she is lean, sharp, hair pulled back and peppered with blonde, mistress of the manor in fact. She tells him she has a spanreed to the queen regent in Kholinar that has gone silent and a working one to Tashikk, and that she is happy here, married to Roshone after his son died, and he is to stop insulting her husband under her roof. She has no use for the boy who imagined himself her rescuer. He pushes past her down the steps.

He kneels beside his father in the triage room and falls back into the surgeon's-assistant role as if no time has passed — scissors, splint, the boy with the speared arm and the bark for relaxant. Lirin inspects the calluses he has earned and tells him he has become a killer, a man of fist and sword, and that war flays men's souls and those wounds a surgeon cannot heal. Kaladin tells him that he is something else now — a watcher at the rim — and that today that means hunting Voidbringers. He puts a hand on his father's shoulder and the First Ideal between them: *Life before death.* Lirin tells him to see his mother before he leaves.

Upstairs again to Laral, who has the spanreed glowing. Roshone's household had been clever enough to hang spheres in the irregular highstorm that had blown opposite the Everstorm, and they have light to send by. He reaches Navani, then Dalinar himself, through the Tashikk intermediary; he reports what little he has learned, the parshmen's nonviolence, the storm in turmoil, his intention to scout. Dalinar gives him his orders: follow the enemy enough to know what they are doing, take no unnecessary risks, send up a glyph each evening so they know he is alive. *Life before death.*

Coming back down to the entry hall, he stops on the bottom step. His mother is across the room speaking with a knot of young girls and holding a toddler on her hip — a year-old boy chewing his fingers and babbling around them. *Meet your brother,* she says, and the world tilts around him. Oroden. *Child of peace.* He takes the child into hands that feel too rough for that skin and weeps where his own homecoming and his own parents had not made him.

The ancient ardent Zeheb brings him the scroll case of maps. He calls for any infused spheres the household has and trades two chips for each, his mother making the swap for him; what comes back is only a pouch, but enough. His father adds a single glowing chip from his own pocket. Kaladin asks them to come away to safety — a place he knows of, for the three of them. Lirin refuses. He will not leave the wounded. Kaladin sets his jaw and pulls open the manor door to the rain.

Then he turns back. To the hundred frightened townspeople in the hall — and to Roshone and Laral watching from the stairs — he confirms aloud what they had already been whispering: the Voidbringers have returned. He draws in his Stormlight and lifts off the floor in luminescent smoke, Syl in his hand as a Shardspear, and tells them that Highprince Dalinar Kholin has refounded the Knights Radiant and that this time they will not fail. *You I will protect,* he thinks at the child in his mother's arms, *all of you.* Then he Lashes himself out into the rain — toward Stringken first, half a day south, to trade for more spheres before he goes hunting.