POV: rock
Summary
Out on a plateau of the Shattered Plains, Numuhukumakiaki'aialunamor — Lunamor to himself, Rock to his friends — stirs an enormous cauldron of finger-crab stew with two hands while Kaladin musters Bridge Four and a handful of recruits for Windrunner training. The first rule of warfare is to know your enemy, Lunamor was always taught, and making a good stew is a lot like going to war. He keeps his back toward Narak and his eyes drifting west — toward the old warcamps — for reasons he keeps to himself. Kaladin tells the squires he barely understands how he learned to use Stormlight himself; they will stumble through this together. They all speak the First Ideal aloud, Lunamor whispering it with them, and Kaladin hands Lopen a pouch of gemstones and divides the squires into squads — only realizing partway through that Teft is not there.
Lopen starts glowing instantly and then crashes back to the plateau, having literally stuck himself face-down to the ground so the earth will not feel abandoned when he flies, and Lunamor hands off the stirring to Dabbid. On kitchen duty with him is Huio, who without asking dusts the chilled Horneater drink *shiki* with the spicy lazbo powder. Lunamor bellows in outrage, tastes it, and promotes Huio on the spot to *airsick lowlander, second class.* As he turns toward Hobber, who is supposed to be helping, he sees Kaladin kneeling at the stool where Hobber is peeling tubers — dead legs from the Assassin in White's attack on the king's palace — and folding a gemstone into the man's fist, telling him quietly that being a Radiant is less a matter of strength or skill than of heart, and that his is the best of any of them.
Lunamor coaxes Kaladin over to drink the new shiki and deflects his gentle probe about the brother whose death moved Lunamor off the warrior path. He explains the Peaks rule that only fourth sons and younger — *tuanalikina* — may be spent on soldiering, the older sons being too valuable, and notes why peak-to-peak war is rarer than Kaladin might think. Then he points out a figure crossing the bridge onto the plateau: the king with a Bridge Eleven escort. Elhokar asks his Windrunner not as commander but as a man whether he will fly him home and help him retake Kholinar. Kaladin gives him roughly twenty days to train squires, and yes, he will go.
Renarin arrives from the Oathgate he has been working and hangs at the edge of the practice; Lunamor calls him over to make flatbread instead. They sit across the cauldron and slap dough onto heated stones. Lunamor tells Renarin that Bridge Four is not the Windrunners and never was — it is him, it is Dabbid, it is Lunamor himself — and that as a Truthwatcher Renarin is just as much Bridge Four as anyone else. Renarin confesses he has always been told he should be an ardent and resents that he wants what his father wants only because his father wants it; Lunamor tells him he can be himself without that being a bad thing, and points across to Rlain sitting alone on a rock — *this thing is what everyone always tells him, over and over again.* Renarin gets up and goes to sit beside Rlain.
Lunamor sees a thing on the next plateau that staggers him: a tall woman-shaped spren in a gown, with two dozen lesser shapes — clouds, ribbons, bundles of leaves — clustering around her and watching the training. He drops to his knees and gives the proper signs. Sylphrena alights on his cauldron in her small form and explains: those are her kin, and the woman at their head is Phendorana — a kind-of-maybe-sort-of-halfway mother-figure who once reprimanded her for searching out Kaladin. They are here, and they hate to be wrong, so they will not speak to her. Lunamor arranges what spheres he has in bowls as offerings and bows; the Phendorana-figure draws Light from one bowl and zips away, but the others stay, watching. *Not just bridgemen,* he tells Sylphrena quietly. *Not just squires. Radiants, as Kaladin wishes.*
Across the plateau the practice catches. Drehy is suddenly glowing, then Bisig — whose ruined hand mends as the Light takes him. Lunamor himself manages a brief draw under Skar's coaching. And Hobber sits on his stool staring at his fist as if at the only fire in a cold dark night, mouth moving, windspren beginning to gather — and then the Light in his hand goes out. *Ha! HA!* Lunamor shouts. The men come running with their gemstones, Hobber drinks them down, his legs find him; Drehy and Peet help him up; he stands precariously on his own. Lopen gives him the two-armed Bridge Four salute he has only just learned to make.
Lunamor glances west out of habit and finally sees what he has been waiting for: a plume of smoke. Kaladin flies; the bridgemen run with their old wooden bridge — the one Dalinar had hauled up out of a chasm and gave back to them at Teft's request — at a sprint, Stormlight glowing in their pockets and on their skins. They cross chasm after chasm faster than any of their old runs. A lumber caravan, struck by sky-borne Voidbringers who streak away as they arrive, lies wrecked and burning. Lunamor runs the bodies, hands trembling, until he sees behind a piled-up fortification of stolen furniture a stout woman with a deep red braid raising a bow at him: his wife, with his six children behind her. He blubbers and scrambles up over the fortification.
He presents them to Bridge Four one by one in a tearful introduction: *Song* his wife (best fort-builder of their childhood), the twins Gift and Cord (sixteen, the only children taught lowlander languages, Cord speaks only Veden), then smaller Rock, Star, Kuma'tiki — named for a shell — and finally four-year-old Beautiful Song, who shies from a father she does not remember. Renarin arrives with Adolin and two companies of troops, and Renarin's healing saves several caravan lives. Tuaka kneels with Lunamor and asks what happened to Kef'ha, Tifi, and Sinaku'a; Lunamor tells her quietly that they are dead, killed for raising weapons in vengeance, and when she begins the obvious question he cuts her off and says he is a chef now, and only that. She tells him quietly that something is wrong back in the Peaks — *very wrong* — but will not say more until they are safe.
Kaladin offers Lunamor his own rooms for the family, promises to push harder for family quarters, and tells him to walk his family home. Lunamor refuses: it will be a privilege to carry the bridge one last time, for his family. *One last time?* Kaladin asks. Lunamor tells him simply that Bridge Four will not run with the bridge after today — from now on they go by sky. The bridgemen lift the bridge for the run back — slaves no longer, Light in their pockets, skins glowing — carrying it reverently, like a king's bier on its last march to the tomb.