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Eleven years before the present, Dalinar leans on a cold windowsill in a solitary stone keep tucked into the highlands of the Alethkar–Veden border country — a gem of a fortress newly taken from the Vedens. The chamber behind him has been decorated like a hunting lodge, hung with old greatshell trophies; a soldier stokes the hearth as others lay out a map on the long table. He waves Adolin, not yet thirteen, over to inspect a ledge in the bulging stonework beneath the window — and then nods to a guard, who hauls on a lever and slides the ledge back into the wall. *Defense against Shardbearers.* A drop from this height would crack a man's Plate, and the corridors inside the keep are too narrow to swing a Blade. The boy laughs at the trick, full of the same restless energy he always has. If only Dalinar could put that to use on a battlefield, he would have no need for Shards at all.

Dalinar gathers his son and a few of his junior officers around the map. *Where are we now?* Adolin recites confidently — this new keep, the old border in one shade, the new one in blue, twenty years of land won back. And the trade treaty their party had ceremonially sealed with the Veden highprince. *But what matters most isn't the land,* Dalinar presses. *It's recognition.* By signing the treaty the Veden king has admitted Gavilar's right to the throne of Alethkar and forestalled a larger war. The boy nods, taking it in, and Dalinar reflects — half amused at himself — on what these last years of small skirmishes have done for him. He had assumed his generals would resent a child at their tactics meetings; instead Adolin is so earnest and curious that no one can. In his youth Dalinar had warred all day and drunk with his soldiers all night; now he has to put his reasoning into words for a boy who expects him to know the answers, and saying it aloud feels astonishingly good. He has no intention of slipping back into the wasted Kholinar years of parties and tavern brawls. Even as he listens, his eyes drift to another section of the map: pencilled troop projections for the Rift.

Evi sweeps in shivering — central Alethkar is colder than she had thought possible — and chides her son into the jacket he has forgotten to wear, looking to Teleb for backup that comes only as a smile. Dalinar sends Adolin off to his geography lesson with the promise of a ride tomorrow, and the boy hops down and gives his mother a hug on the way out — an un-Alethi gesture his father has long since stopped trying to correct. Dalinar watches his wife move to the fire and notices, almost in passing, how the years have worn down her foreignness. Her accent is fading. She sits with her safehand demurely tucked at her waist. Her blonde hair is bound up in Alethi braids rather than tumbling loose. She will never be much of a scribe — she came to letters too late, and prefers her meditations to books anyway — but she has worked at it, and he is impressed. She still complains, often, that he does not see Renarin enough; the other son is unfit for battle and lives chiefly in Kholinar year round, with her there for half of it.

A scribe arrives bearing a spanreed dispatch from the king. Everyone but the two of them clears the room. Evi reads it aloud: warm praise for Dalinar's tactical instincts, Gavilar's private pride in him — even the generals, every last one, now name him their equal — and a wistful note that the brothers have not spoken in three years. Then the letter pivots. The unrest at the Rift has not yielded to politics. Gavilar is sending Dalinar back to break Tanalan's faction before civil war can tear Alethkar apart; Sadeas will follow with reinforcements; another of the highprinces — they don't know which — is quietly arming the rebels and may even be supplying Shards. *I should have heard you out years ago, when you wanted to ride against the Rift.* Evi looks up. *How did you know, Dalinar? You've been bent over these maps for weeks.* He has, indeed, been studying the Crownlands and central Alethkar for weeks. *A strategist who cannot guess the next battlefield is no strategist at all.*

The argument that follows is the one Evi has been carrying for years. Seven years living out of wagons and waystops, seven years of dying men weeping over their own wounds. She had thought the killing would soon be behind them. He tells her that walking away would have squandered everything; Gavilar would have found a war for him somewhere — Herdaz again, perhaps — and besides, though he does not say it aloud, there are advisors in Kholinar who think the kingdom safer with the Blackthorn kept far from the throne. *We are never going home for good, Evi. Not to Kholinar.* He returns to the map and works out, half aloud, that the answer at the Rift is to round and seize the lakeshore with a mobile band, then move the whole army across it faster than the rebels can react. When he looks up, she is crying.

She weeps quietly and turns toward the fire, folding her arms tight at her chest. The soft sniffles unnerve him in a way no battlefield ever has; this, he realizes, is what helplessness feels like. She tells him the other women at court make her feel stupid — conversation among the Alethi is a contest, an ugly unspoken pageant to prove how clever each is — and she has thought, more than once, of going to the Nightwatcher and asking the Old Magic for the blessing of a sharper mind so she can keep up. He cuts her off. *Don't speak of that creature, Evi. It's blasphemous.* And she rounds on him about Alethi piety: no one here actually believes anything. You pay ardents to burn glyphwards and Soulcast rocks into grain so you needn't pause your wars long enough to gather food. In her homeland some at least take the One and the Heralds seriously; here it is all show.

He tries to deflect with questions about her people — talking about her homeland often calms her — then offers, when the Rift is done, to take her north into the Steamwater. Just the two of them. They could even bring Adolin. *And Renarin?* she demands; he has two sons, in case it has slipped his mind, or is the other one nothing to him now that he cannot grow into a soldier? Dalinar takes the blow as though struck, stands, and gathers his maps. *I know how to recognise a fight I'll lose.* He promises her a full year in Kholinar after the Rift falls. *You've won this one.* *I don't feel like I have.* *Welcome to war. The wins that exist are the ones that bury fewer of your friends than the alternative.*

He slams the door behind him. Shamespren fall around him on the steps like flower petals as her weeping chases him down. *Storms, I don't deserve her, do I?* Well, so be it; the quarrel had been hers to start, he tells himself, and the repercussions too. He stomps down to find his officers and put together the next plan for the Rift.