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Nine years before, ten-year-old Kal — he prefers the short name to his lighteyes-sounding full one — stumbles late into his father Lirin's surgery in Hearthstone. Lirin has already drugged Sani, a fifteen-year-old whose freehand was crushed somewhere out in the town, with winterwort. The shutters are closed; the room is lit by a borrowed globe of broam spheres on permanent loan from Brightlord Wistiow, because Stormlight does not flicker the way a lantern does and that steadiness saves lives.

Kal washes his hands — Lirin invokes the Heralds' tradition that deathspren and rotspren hate water — and corrects his son's village-school confusion between the Heralds (who taught mankind and led them against the Voidbringers) and the Lost Radiants (the orders of knights they founded, who betrayed humankind after they were left alone). The wound is gruesome — three broken fingers, the third twisted past saving — and Kal recognizes that the third finger must come off. His father, pleased with the diagnosis, performs the amputation, sews up the rest, cauterizes, and dresses the hand with lister's oil. Through it all Kal is anxious; his father gently tells him that caring can be a problem if it interferes with surgery.

Cleaning the room afterward, Lirin asks where Kal was when he should have arrived earlier. With Jam, Kal admits — Jam, two years older, whose soldier-father (lame from Brightlord Amaram's army) has begun training him in the quarterstaff. Kal makes the case for soldiering and honor; Lirin counters that the world has two kinds of people — those who save lives and those who take them — and dismisses Kal's third category (protectors who kill to save) as "trying to stop a storm by blowing harder." Then, drilling his son on winterwort dosing and the symptoms of fiddlepox, Lirin softens. He has been saving the family's coin from grateful townsfolk's donations. At sixteen he wants to send Kal all the way to Kharbranth to apprentice under real surgeons — far beyond his own Shorseboron training under Vathe. "You have a gift from the Heralds themselves. Don't waste it on killing." Kal hesitates, then nods.