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Twenty-three years before the present, Dalinar sits jammed shoulder-to-shoulder at a stained table in a lighteyed-and-darkeyed wrestling den, rubbing firemoss between his fingers. The euphoria pulls a thin plume of smoke up past his nose, lets him stop hearing the reports of Rift rebellion and stop imagining himself out on the fields solving the problem the only way he knows how. Beside him are Havar — lean, bearded, former elite, one of the few who treats him as a man — and Bashin in the wide-brimmed Purelake hat the others keep threatening to burn. In the centre of the room two wrestlers circle a ring of diamond chips; Havar bets Bashin's hat on the shorter man.

The shorter man wins by stance, not strength, and the sound of bodies hitting wood is enough to remind Dalinar of the battlefield. The featured bout collapses when a wrestler's opponent develops stomach trouble. The crowd boos. Dalinar strips off his shirt and steps up to the ring to take the empty fight himself. The crowd goes silent. The challenger — a feared man called Makh, never defeated — refuses on the spot and backs away. *Hurting you? Storms, that's not what I'm afraid of.* The gathering quietly dissolves. He has broken some kind of rule by trying to join in. The bench fills with angerspren. Back at his table he learns from Havar and Bashin that the *fine* tavern brawl they had told him about weeks earlier had in fact left one man unable to walk, another short an arm, and a third reduced to babbling.

The back door cracks open and Toh looks in — wide-eyed, ill-suited to the Alethi clothes he is wearing — to deliver the news that midwives are with Evi, and the baby is coming early but well. Dalinar is out the door before Toh can finish.

Evi receives him from childbed with the look of a soldier just off a field — exhaustionspren rising from her brow like jets — and lets him hold her hand through the thin envelope she still wears over her safehand. A nurse hands him the baby and he lifts the boy aloft, whooping in unrestrained joy, gloryspren bursting around him as golden spheres. *He's a Kholin. He's made of hardy stuff.* The child has shockingly thick hair, black and blond mixed. *Adoda — Light. Lin — Born unto.* Adolin. A traditional name, full of meaning. He looks down at the boy and finally understands his brother's preoccupation with futures and kingdoms. This child, at least, could rule the princedom in honour and never need to be what its father has become.

Gavilar takes him aside in the den afterward and, when Dalinar presses, confesses what the public propaganda has been hiding: the Rift is in open rebellion. Tanalan — the old Rathalas highprince's son — is rebuilding his fathers' fortifications and quietly raising an army, encouraged by the other highprinces, who want to see how the king handles it. Gavilar himself has settled at last on the black iron circlet he wears, despite the Sunmaker having gone without a crown and the histories saying Jezerezeh'Elin had refused one too. *I am failing,* he says. *It is time to show the kingdom that we are not soft.*

Dalinar tries to refuse, frightened by his own bar-fight reputation and by what holding his own son has just done to him. He has tried to live a quiet life and cannot. Gavilar tells him he is what the Almighty made him and that he has been trying to cast out the Thrill without replacing it with anything else. He will not in the end ride against the Rift — striking Tanalan would unite the rest of Alethkar in rebellion. He will ride instead against a new Reshi dynasty in Herdaz and a Veden border raid in Jah Keved, to remind every highprince in Alethkar why they were once afraid of him. Dalinar agrees and turns toward the door. *Words are important,* Gavilar tells his back. *Much more than you give them credit for being.* *Perhaps,* Dalinar answers, *but if they were all-powerful, you wouldn't need my sword, would you?*