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Five and a half years before, in a darkened hired carriage rocking home from a country call beneath the violet light of Salas, Lirin finally tells Kal what the rest of Hearthstone has long suspected. The broam spheres locked in the surgery cabinet — the spheres meant for Kal's Kharbranth tuition — were not given. Lirin took them from Brightlord Wistiow's estate during the citylord's final half-lucid days, to lock the tuition in before any incoming new citylord could countermand the gift. He thought of it as a theft he could live with. Roshone knows. The persecution of the surgery is not pure spite; the spheres in Lirin's cabinet do, by inheritance and by law, belong to the new citylord.

The world flips for Kal. He looks at his father in the half-light of the carriage and cannot decide whether what he did was incredibly brave or incredibly wrong, and after a long quiet rocking minute he decides both. He decides also that he will take the spheres to Kharbranth regardless and pay them back over time — not to Roshone, who has already taken half the village's love and would only use them to take more, but to Laral, who his father thinks Roshone's son will claim in engagement before the year is out.

And he decides one other thing, aloud, sitting up straighter on the carriage seat so his father can hear it. From tonight he will go by the full version of his name. He is no longer just the village boy Kal. He is a young man who is going to learn to face the lighteyes on their own ground. Lirin watches him say it and does not contradict him; the carriage rocks on through the dark; and the boy in it begins, from that moment forward, to be called Kaladin.