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The morning after the apothecary trade Kaladin leads all twenty-nine remaining men of Bridge Four — including the last holdout Bisig — through stretches and bridge drills in the lumberyard. The carpenters at the saws laugh and point as the bridgemen lurch through the motions. Gaz watches one-eyed from the shadow of an unfinished barrack, then crosses to pay Lamaril his half-share — the rectangular-bearded under-officer who holds whatever secret over Gaz is keeping him in his job and out of the chasms. Gaz mutters to Lamaril about the new shape of Kaladin's crew, and uses the word *problem*.

Kaladin drills a new tactic in front of all of them: a side carry of the bridge, held along its right edge so the deck shields the runners on the right and a different set of shoulder muscles take the load. It frees the crew to keep moving even when fewer hands remain to lift after a heavy run. The crew bunches and stumbles; the handholds were not designed for it and the men are not yet shaped for it. Gaz watches them lurch past with the bridge canted on edge and smiles to himself. On an actual assault, a side-carry could be a disaster — a slow, exposed approach with men packed too close to recover from a single dropped body. *Initiative. Creativity. Keep practicing*, Kaladin tells the crew. Gaz badly needs a disaster, anything that will lift the Lamaril weight off him.

In the afternoon Kaladin picks Moash as a subsquad leader, choosing him for the very stubbornness that resisted him longest. Moash says plainly that unlike Rock and Teft he does not think Kaladin is a gift from the Almighty — he is just curious enough to see what happens — and accepts the role. Syl swirls around the bridge as a flurry of leaves and laughs in the dust. The crew is becoming, by inches, something other than what it began as. And Gaz now badly wants to see them carry that bridge in that formation into a wall of Parshendi arrows. He is willing to wait for it.