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Kaladin and Teft are tracking down the Hearthstone refugee Cressa's missing uncle. His name is Noril; he is one-armed; Lirin remembers him, of course — his father forgets no face. Noril had arrived in Hearthstone the day Kaladin brought the flying ship, displaying signs of severe battle-shock, and Lirin had made sure he was on the airship to Urithiru — only to lose him in the crush of refugees and pass him along to the ardents. So Kaladin and Teft start with the rehab devotary, the one whose ardents care for amputees and the deaf. The ardent there gathers cushions from a teaching-floor while Kaladin holds the stack for her; he idly Lashes them so they hover beside him, and she recognizes him at once and apologizes. Yes, she remembers Noril — but his wounds, she explains, ran deeper than the missing arm. They had kept him as long as they could; last week he had tried to hang himself in their care, and the surgeon who brought him had warned them in advance to watch for it, so they had saved him. After that they had sent him to the Devotary of Mercy, whose charge is *those who have trouble with their minds*. Teft calls the choice irresponsible; Kaladin reminds him that his father had known where he was going and sent him here anyway.

They strike inward through the lower floors of the tower, past the bolted Stormlight lanterns of the populated rim and into a darker zone where they need handheld spheres. Kaladin notices that even he avoids these inner corridors — people will walk the whole rim around to a lit hallway rather than cut through. The Devotary of Mercy sits on the fourth floor near the Aladar princedom, marked by a Vorin-sword glyphpair on a wooden door wedged into a complex of small rooms. A younger ardent answers, squints to read Teft's eye color, can't quite tell, and bows twice. He tries to fob them off with a *speak to Sister Yara* and a form for Kaladin's wife to fill out; Teft sighs, summons a Shardspear, and pulls Stormlight from the corridor's three nearest lanterns. The ardent bows much lower and finds them the records: yes, Noril is here, no family of record, profoundly disturbed, one unsuccessful suicide attempt. Kaladin tells him to show them to him.

The corridor is a row of identical numbered doors, each with a small window onto a featureless cell. Kaladin hears a woman muttering and rocking in one. *How many of these rooms have people in them?* Most of them, the ardent says — they took in patients from across the princedoms when the coalition consolidated at the tower. *You lock them in here?* Teft demands. *In the dark?* The ardent quotes the standard line: many of the mentally deficient react poorly to overstimulation. Kaladin asks, increasingly hard, *how do you know? Have you tested it? Compared treatments?* The ardent says there are no cures for mental ailments — even Edgedancers cannot help, except for recent brain trauma — and asks that Brightlord please leave medicine to those trained in it. Teft tells him, gently, that they could be stuck with a hundred swords and would only complain about ruined outfits, so open the storming door. Noril is huddled on the cell floor in a thin shirt, refusing the straw bed, asking only that his niece be told he is dead. There are no blankets — he might use one to strangle himself.

Kaladin kneels and tells him his niece is worried about him; that he is not alone; that he has family. Noril does not move. *I know how you feel,* Kaladin says — *dark, like there's never been light in the world, like everything in you is a void and you wish you could just feel something. Pain would at least tell you you're alive.* Noril turns his head, red-eyed from sleeplessness, and looks at him. Kaladin stands and offers a hand. *Come with me and talk. Afterward, if you want me to tell your niece you're dead, I will. You can come back here and rot. But if you don't, I'm going to keep annoying you. I'm good at it. Trust me, I learned from the best.* Noril takes the hand. The ardent protests; Kaladin silences him with a look; Teft gently pulls him aside. They walk Noril up out of the inner corridors. Syl zips into the corridor from her morning flight to report on the joys of Aladar's axehound puppies — *I had no idea how much I needed to see puppies until I flew by them this morning* — and follows along.

They reach a wide communal balcony like the one outside his clinic. Noril stops in the archway with his eyes watering and looks up at the sky. Teft guides him to a chair by the railing, overlooking the mountains. He asks after the niece, and then talks slowly, with the hollow stare of a man who lost his family in a way Lirin had called brutal and who had also lost the arm years earlier, in a different event. Kaladin says quietly that for some people it piles up bit by bit until you realize you are drowning, and that he would not trade places with the man who took it all at once. Teft asks about nightmares. Noril cannot remember the details of his — *maybe that's some mercy from the Almighty.* Kaladin names what he is hearing: you don't want to kill yourself, you want to stop existing — and tells him it would not, in fact, be better for everyone if he vanished, that his niece's life would be made better by his return. Noril says he cannot feel that way. *I know,* Kaladin tells him. *That's why you need someone to tell it to you. Someone to remind you the world hasn't always been this way; that it won't always be this way.* Teft adds his own piece: a man can't hate himself for what he has done or not done — he used to, he still tries to, and he keeps reminding himself it's the easy path and not what *they* would have wanted of him.

Kaladin crosses to the ardent on the stone bench and asks him about treatments. For melancholia? *Keep them away from things that might aggravate them. Keep them clean. Let them be in peace.* For aggression? Same. Battle shock? Hallucinations? You know the answer, Brightlord. Most people would rather not look at these patients at all, the ardent admits, embarrassed — *they shove them off to the ardents. You might think us callous, but we're the only ones who care. Who try.* Kaladin tells him he is approaching it wrong — that a man in shock should be repositioned feet up, head down; that a neck wound should not be moved at all; that different ailments need severely different treatments and that no one is doing the work of finding out which here. They need to talk to these patients. They need to try things and see what helps. The ardent doubts they can move the head ardents or find the resources. Kaladin looks at Noril tipping his face up to the sun with eyes closed and feels something stir deep inside him. He had worried that the clinic would not let his oaths drive him to protect anyone; he had worried he would be an inferior surgeon to his father. But there is one thing he understands that most surgeons and ardents — even his father — do not, and the chapter ends on it: *release this man to my care. And warn your superiors I will be coming for others.* The ardents can complain all the way to Brightness Navani if they want; she will give them the same answer he is giving now. *We're going to try something new.*