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A few hours of open sky and sunlight have done their usual work on Kaladin by the time the Shattered Plains come into view. He flies at the head of his Windrunners under a single Lashing, Syl running messenger because the wind eats half the words. Yunfah — the elderly honorspren left without a knight since his Windrunner Vratim was killed months ago, and the only free honorspren Kaladin has — has narrowed his next bond to five candidates and refuses to consider Rlain among them. Kaladin forces the issue: as highmarshal he forbids Yunfah to bond anyone else until he tries Rlain first. *Ten days,* he says, *and that is generous.* The little man shakes his fist, then leaves with a grudging *fine*. Syl tells him Yunfah will at least consider; the spren would rather not return to Shadesmar.

They drop into Narak — once the heart of the listeners' city, now becoming a Kholin fortress with a six-foot-thick storm wall against the east, a thinner wall around the rest, collapsible bridges outside, lightning rods against the Everstorm. Syl does an arc around the ancient stepped pillar at the plateau's edge — used in listener ceremonies, Rlain said, but whose original purpose he does not know. The other Windrunners lower Dalinar, the Edgedancers, and Navani's pod. Kaladin just wants to get to Urithiru and clean up before someone else tries to cheer him up with a forced laugh.

Dalinar makes him wait while he reads a battalionlord's report aloud to himself — quietly making his officers confront the king who can read — then disposes of Ialai: publish her death as suicide, order the warcamps brought fully under Kholin occupation. He is officially king of Urithiru now, a station distinct from Jasnah's queenship over Alethkar, and has formally renounced any notion of being a *highking* over any other monarch. Then he walks Kaladin aside in the gap between two of the Soulcast grain stores and opens, gently, with the easier complaint: multiple reports of Windrunners letting wounded Fused go. Kaladin relaxes. He explains the bargain — Heavenly Ones in honourable one-on-ones, killing them barely an inconvenience, losing his Windrunners ruinous. Dalinar hears him. And then asks the harder question: wasn't Honor the singers' god first, before he was the humans'? — the revelation that this world was the singers' first, and that humans arrived bringing Odium, a truth Dalinar still winces at.

It is only the warm-up. Dalinar segues into eight months without a single new honorspren coming to bond a Windrunner; Syl reveals herself to him to confirm that her cousins still consider humans as dangerous as singers because of how many of their kind died in the Recreance. The war is moving into the sky and there are not enough Radiants coming up. And then he reaches the conversation Kaladin feared from the moment the easy one started: he is relieving him of duty. *Among the finest who has ever served under me. I'm sorry, son.*

Kaladin knocks Dalinar's hand off his shoulder. *You can't do this. I built the Windrunners.* Dalinar does not raise his voice. He says, plainly, that any other man would have been benched off the front weeks past, and that the Windrunners' momentum is now strong enough to survive without him at the front. *And if one of them counts on your spear and you lock up again — what then?* Kaladin turns aside and squeezes his eyes shut against the tears, and knows, instantly, that Dalinar is right. He had needed to speak the next Words a year back, with Dalinar's life on the line, and he had folded in on himself instead. He will probably never speak them. Other spren have said many Radiants never do.

Dalinar is careful with what he gives back. Kaladin keeps his oaths and his rank; he is not demoted; the change will be framed to the men as a promotion. He has ten days to choose a new role — training, logistics, battle planning, an ambassador's post in Thaylenah or Azir, somewhere his reputation does the work for him. Kaladin tells him, gently, that he could not bear training the Windrunners and watching them fly to fight without him; Dalinar allows him to request a different duty. *Many ways to protect,* Dalinar says. Syl nods that the oaths can be kept this way. Kaladin does the smile that lets the king walk away believing him.

He looks across at the Narak courtyard at his men — Rock and Teft, Renarin, Sigzil and Lyn and Lopen, Leyten and Peet, Skar and Drehy, the newly-forged Laran — laughing in high spirits, knowing the Windrunners lost no one today. The chapter title is Kaladin's private accounting: they did take a single profound casualty. The casualty's name had been Kaladin Stormblessed.