(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kaladin ties a three-glyph prayer cloth around his upper right arm in the lull before Bridge Four is called out for an assault. He has watched soldiers do it for half his life and never put one on himself. He does today. Moash scoffs at the gesture; Rock approves of it with the solemnity of a man at a wedding; Teft watches him tie the knot and says nothing at all, which from Teft is its own kind of approval. Kaladin thinks of his father, who would scoff at it harder than Moash did, and ties it anyway. He has reasons. He is not entirely sure what they are.

The crews are run out to one of the closer plateaus and dropped into a contest that, by every measure of the past half year, should have killed half of them. The assault goes impossibly well. No Bridge Four bridge is lost. A Shardbearer of Sadeas's elite happens, against every expectation, to be in position to clear the chasm rim of Parshendi archers at the worst possible moment. The run home is short. The wounded are few. Sadeas himself rides past the crew at the staging plateau on the way back, glances at them, and tells Kaladin in passing that they did well — a thing that has never happened in the year Kaladin has been in the man's camp. The crew is unsettled by it and then, quietly, in a way none of them will name, proud.

Afterwards, in the lumberyard, Kaladin sits to work on the wounded with practiced hands. He pushes his sleeve back to favor his good arm and notices the long shallow cut along his other forearm. He does not remember earning it; it has bled through the prayer cloth, and the prayer cloth is stiff with dried blood — but the wound itself is shallower than it should be, the skin closed over a clean seam he did not stitch. He glances at the Stormlight sphere in his pouch. It is dim. He looks at it a moment longer than he means to. Moash kneels next to him with a needle and a length of pig gut. *You almost make me think I should get one of those armbands*, he says, watching Kaladin thread the needle. *Wait to see if we escape*, Kaladin tells him, and bends to the first cut. *That's the real test.*