(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kaladin is at his father's clinic in a white surgeon's apron — a thing Lirin always wanted, on the theory that white instantly signals a surgeon is not the kind of butcher or barber who travels small towns dirty and bloody. He bandages the ankle of an Hearthstone boy named Adin who jumped down the steps multiple-at-a-time, and tells him to keep his weight off it for a week. Adin cheerfully agrees — but only until he gets his own spren and becomes a Windrunner who can float down stairs and stick his friends to walls if they argue with him. (A Herdazian Windrunner with a big smile told him so.) Kaladin washes his hands, Lirin's habit transferred over, and asks himself whether he is happy. He is not sad. For now he will accept *not sad*.

Between patients he sees an older man named Mil for headaches; he rules out the easy causes, has the reading-girl Hawin pull the migraine prodromes list, then realizes she has stepped out to the privy. A small voice picks up the reading instead. Syl has settled on the book and is laboriously turning pages by lifting their corners into the air. She reads the list one word at a time — *constipation* defeats her — and asks how humans live like this, where stuff going out of you is bad and stuff not going out of you is bad. Kaladin gives Mil a chit for medicine and asks him to record each headache as it comes — affirmation that the pain is real, he tells himself, is often worth as much as the medicine. After Mil leaves, he asks Syl when she learned to read. Last week. She thinks she might be able to become surgery tools, too — not a scalpel, since she cannot cut flesh, but maybe one of his father's little reflex hammers, with a cloth wrap on the head. She has a sense, she tells him, that there are powers they have never had time to explore because Radiants have always been at war. Then she catches him watching her and pastes on a smile that is trying a little too hard.

On a break he steps out to the wide communal balcony that has become a kind of town square for the Hearthstone refugees on the sixth floor, and watches Dalinar's armies gathering below for the trip to Azir. He makes himself look. Leyten sees him and brings a wing of about fifty Windrunners up to hover by the balcony; children come running, everyone stops to watch, and as one the wing salutes him in the Bridge Four style — most of them never were in Bridge Four, but they always give it to him and the originals. He returns the salute. They streak down and a battalion vanishes through the Oathgate in a circle of light. The transfer's cost depends on the Radiant operating it; Jasnah is on duty today, and he knows from how little Stormlight she has spent that she has plainly sworn the Fourth Ideal — the one he will never reach. Syl says quietly, *they're all going away*. Not all of them, he answers. About twenty stay to guard the tower. *But none of our friends.* That part is true. All of the original Bridge Four are going with Dalinar. He tells himself to remember the peace of the last week and not be sorry for himself, and it does not work. He goes back inside and asks Hawin for the next patient.

There is a cough going through the tower — mucus, body aches, no plaguespren around to attract anyway — that the Kharbranthian surgeons are tracking as a Western plague mild enough to barely live up to its name. He recommends rest, fluids, handwashing. Late in the day a refugee woman with a cough asks if he has seen her uncle, said to match a description and last reported in Hearthstone just before the evacuation. Kaladin tells her to wait and goes to find his father; Lirin's exam room is empty, his mother's voice carries from the waiting room — and just before he turns the corner he hears a different voice that stops him cold.

*Always been like this. Been clean for — what, six months now? Storm me. Can't stand the battle though. Itches at my brain.* Teft is sitting in the waiting room out of uniform — common trousers and shirt, grey beard trimmed, Phendorana nowhere in sight as she usually prefers. He was mobilized; he should be with the Windrunners. He tells Kaladin he went to the Blackthorn and asked to step down — bad knee, cough, too much wrong with his head, war is for young kids and not old dried-up pieces of bark. With Rock gone and Moash worse than gone, Sigzil is better off leading without him as baggage; *you and I were the start of this, lad*, he adds, and figures they ought to stick together. Kaladin tells him he is doing better and has no reason to step down. *Felt like it was time.* Kaladin orders him back to duty. Teft lifts his chin and folds his arms: *you ain't got knots on your shoulder now, lad. You can't order me to do anything.* Kaladin turns helplessly to his mother, and she shrugs and says you should not force someone into war unless you want to be like Amaram. Syl gasps and claps from his shoulder.

Kaladin knows Teft is exaggerating — the man is prone to addictive and self-destructive habits, but he is not battle-shocked — and also knows that a good sergeant never lets his officer walk into an unknown situation alone, and that Teft takes that to heart and is never going to budge. He surrenders. *Fine.* Teft hops up, salutes Kaladin's mother, and falls in behind. What are we doing today? he asks. Kaladin starts to push him toward a diagnosis room; Teft waves it off — *know I'm crazy already, skip that part* — and rephrases the question. *Binding wounds?* The line gives the chapter its title. Kaladin trained them all as surgeon's assistants once. He could do worse for an aide. He feels something warm: they aren't all gone. He thanks him, says he shouldn't have given up so much, and then steers them toward the next problem — there is a refugee woman in the waiting room looking for her uncle. Maybe they can track him down for her.