(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

A short single-scene chapter at the runaway parshmen's improvised camp under the trees. Kaladin is bandaging Khen's forearm — she cut it on his knife stripping firewood — and using the cut as an excuse to lecture her on field surgery the way his father once lectured him. Boil the cloth. A clean knife cuts deeper but heals better than a dirty gouge. Watch for rotspren, watch for the red streak. He pats her arm, takes back the knife, and leaves her with the others as they bring in the cakes drying in the sun.

The band have been quietly resourceful with what they took on the raid — metal buckets that double as boiling pots, waterskins that will be a lifesaver — and Kaladin settles in beside the bearded captor he now knows by name. Sah is lashing a stone axehead to a branch. Kaladin tests it against a log and tells him the leather wants to be wet and pulled tighter; otherwise the head will fly midswing.

He pushes Sah to break camp tonight and split the group into smaller bands the way he keeps recommending. *We'll see.* Kaladin presses, and Sah finally looks up. *Where did a slave learn to give orders and strut about like a lighteyes?* — but the real wound underneath is older than that. He hates feeling like a child, hates being taught things he should already know, hates needing this stranger's help. He and his ran. They escaped. Now what? Kaladin jumps in, starts giving orders, and they are back to following Alethi commands again. The yellow spren is no better — tells them they are free and in the next breath berates them for not obeying.

Kaladin tries to talk about freedom. He has, he tells Sah softly, been more *free* the last few months than at any time since his boyhood. What did he do with it? Stayed in one place serving another highlord. He wonders if the men who use cords to bind are fools, because tradition and momentum tie a person down without any need for actual rope. *I don't have traditions,* Sah says. *Or society. My freedom is the freedom of a leaf — dropped from the tree, pretending it's steering.* That, Kaladin tells him, was almost poetry. Sah has no idea what that is.

He pulls the last lashing tight. *Aren't you worried, human? Teaching us to make cakes is one thing. Giving us weapons is quite another.* Kaladin tells him a hatchet is a tool. Sah grants the point and then takes it back: with this same chipping and sharpening, he will eventually make a spear. Kaladin tries the line that the fight is not inevitable. Sah laughs at him. Considering what the humans did to him, he asks calmly, why wouldn't he?

Kaladin tries to offer something — that he knows good lighteyes among the Alethi, that if Sah and his were brought before the right ones and shown to think and talk, they would be heard, the way the Parshendi's cousins were heard when Alethi first met them on the Shattered Plains. The hatchet slams down into the wood and sends a chip into the air. So *this* is why he should be free now — because his people are *acting like humans*? They deserved enslavement before, because they were different? *It's all right to dominate us when we won't fight back, but now it's not, because we can talk?* That is why he is angry, he tells Kaladin. Thank you for what you have shown us. Don't expect me to be glad I needed you. This reinforces it inside you — and maybe inside me — that your people are the ones who decide whether I get to be free.

He stalks off. Once he is gone Syl comes out of the underbrush onto Kaladin's shoulder, alert for the Voidspren but not alarmed. *I think I can sense a highstorm coming,* she whispers. A day or three off. She could have done this earlier, she allows — only she had no reason to. He always had the lists.

Kaladin starts arranging shelter for the band in his head and catches himself. *I can't do this, Syl. I can't spend time with these parshmen, see their side.* The Voidspren is going to drive them into an army, and rightly, after what was done to them; his own people will have to fight back or be destroyed. *Find the middle ground,* she says. Middle ground only comes in a war, he tells her, after lots of people have died — and only after the important people start to think they might lose. He cannot stay; he is starting to want to *defend* these people, and the only way he can fight Voidbringers at all is by pretending there is a difference between the ones he has to protect and the ones he has to kill. He trudges off into the underbrush to help bring down a tarp tent for the night march.