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Kaladin crosses Akanny in a long succession of leaps and short marches, Syl beside him as a raindrop falling the wrong way, the Weeping's steady rain making the wet stone of every hilltop into a slide. He has been working outward in a spiral from Hearthstone for two days, visiting villages, asking after the local parshmen, and warning every town to expect another new storm. Until now every place has had broken roofs and dead silos and no killings. The farmland here is green and prosperous in a way that has nothing to do with the war: Akanny is a cultural backwater but a granary for half Alethkar, with gumfrem in the small pastures for the tiny gemhearts that let you Soulcast meat. Finding his parents alive at Hearthstone has lifted him. Syl takes his upbeat mood and tries it out — riding beside him with an umbrella, lecturing him on whether she might make a wonderful mother, asking whether spren can even have children. The Stormfather, she decides aloud, made her. *Helped shape me, is more like it. Helped us find our voices.*

The village he comes down on next is Hornhollow — sheltered in a depression behind a hill, with two storm sanctuaries and a central rainwater cistern, lit by a few sphere lanterns in the square as the citylord gathers his people for a meeting. Kaladin lands in the middle of the square with Syl on his shoulder as a Windrunner-marked Shardblade and gets cheered for it. The portly citylord rushes spheres at him and waits expectantly to be paid two chips for one as the first villages had done; Kaladin pays a small premium and reminds himself that he cannot keep halving his store. He asks his citylord to send messages of comfort and command to every neighbouring village from the king. And then — finally — yes, the man tells him: this village was actually hit, did the Lord Radiant not come to see the raid?

The raid was on a domed grain silo just outside town, between moonsets. About fifty parshmen in what Kaladin reads as warform — taller, with bony plates, glowing red lights that may or may not have been eyes — pried the door off, hauled away most of the village's seed grain, and walked away when the watch raised the alarm. Two guards were beaten; both lived; Khem has a ringing in his ear that has not gone. Kaladin hefts a cudgel one of the raiders left behind, takes the young ardent's scribbled report, and reads it all the same way: this was not a slaughter party. This was a surgical raid by a force that has somewhere to be. The local trapper has tracked them half a day's distance toward Kholinar without their once veering off. *Then that is where I am going as well,* Kaladin tells them. He draws in his Stormlight and Lashes himself away to the cheers of Hornhollow's rooftops.

Far away at Urithiru, Adolin is in the ground-floor pasture they have given his father's Gallant in the northwest corner of the tower — the only place big enough to keep a Ryshadium properly, ventilated away from the Bashin axehounds and the gumfrems and the conventional horses they have stabled up in rooms. He has come down because his father has not had time. The black stallion comes galloping over for the sugar in his good hand. Adolin talks to him quietly about Sureblood, who had chosen him in the same way Gallant had chosen his father, and who in a flash of light on a plateau had been gone. Everything is insane these days. Not just the horse — what he did to Sadeas in the corridor, and now the investigation his father has handed him as cover for it.

Renarin finds him at the pasture wall. Bashin had told him where to look. They talk through the easy small things — Ryshadium hooves are stone, no shoeing needed, they do not *fit* in the stables — and then Renarin says, awkwardly, that he has to give back the dead Shardblade Adolin won for him at the duel. It hurts to hold. He had thought it was just him until he learned that all of the Radiants feel the same. He has already given it to the ardents for safekeeping. So you will be unarmed, Adolin starts to say — and then catches the look on his brother's face. Renarin stretches out his hand and summons a slim, almost guardless living Blade with waving folds in the metal as if it were forged. Glys has done it. They needed another body for the Oathgate; here is one.

Renarin is afraid of it — what if he hurts someone, or ruins things — and Adolin takes his hand in his good one and tells him that this is the power of the Almighty himself, that he is here to save them. A pulse passes between them. For an instant Adolin sees himself perfected — complete, whole. Renarin pulls his hand back with an apology and goes inside. Only after Gallant has come back for more sugar and Adolin has reached absently into his satchel does he realise he is using his right hand. The splint is loose around a wrist that is no longer broken.