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One year before the slave wagons, in a stone hollow on the borderlands the Alethi call the Unclaimed Hills, Kaladin's squad in Brightlord Amaram's army runs full-tilt into a Parshendi-allied Shardbearer who has come down from the heights to bleed the foragers. The Shardbearer's Blade kills Dallet in a single sweeping cut and Toorim in the same motion, two of Kaladin's closest friends, before the squad has time to form. The honor guard breaks and runs back over the ridge. The squad is shattered. Kaladin stays.

He kills the Shardbearer alone with a spear-thrust through the eye-slit of the helm at the end of a long, breathless, half-mad engagement in which time seems to slow around him in a way he will not understand for years. The Plate falls in pieces around the body. The Blade hits the rock with the bell-clear ring that means it has remembered, momentarily, that there is no living hand on it.

By the old tradition the Blade and Plate of a man you kill in single combat are yours — and with them a lighteyes's title, an estate of land, the right to be called *brightlord*, the right to draw orders from kings. Kaladin kneels by the body for a long moment, breathing, and sees his own face in the silver of the Blade where it lies in the rock. Dallet's blood and Toorim's blood are on his hands and on the Blade both. He cannot become a legend on the back of the thing that killed them. He stands up, lifts the Blade carefully, and turns it over to Coreb of his own squad, the next-most-senior man still standing. Amaram arrives at the rim of the hollow with the returned honor guard a few minutes later and demands an explanation. Kaladin gives him none beyond *I'm giving it to my men.* He climbs out of the hollow past the staring guard and walks back to camp alone in the dust with tears running down his cheeks.