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The next highstorm of the season comes in fast and hard. Dalinar is in the top room of the Kholin complex when the stormwall hits, and he is in Plate — a habit since the Tower — when Szeth Lashes himself down through the shutters in a smear of white silk and lands on the writing desk. The fight starts in the same heartbeat. Szeth has his Honorblade out. He has Stormlight burning under his skin. Dalinar has Oathbringer, the Plate he is wearing, and the room.

He uses all three. He cannot win a duel of speed against a Lashed assassin and does not try. He turns the fight into the kind of fight he does win: heavy, close, leveraged. He draws Szeth down the stairwell where the Lashings cannot get the angle they want; he wedges him into a stair corner where every gravitational vector he can reach for is wrong; he traps Szeth's blade in a doorframe long enough to ram him through a wall with his shoulder. Szeth takes Dalinar's Plate apart piece by piece across two floors. Dalinar survives the breaking of his armor because every time a plate goes Szeth loses a half-second of his timing recovering balance. By the time the stormwall passes, Szeth is bleeding for the first time in years and the Kholin guard is on the stair. Szeth Lashes himself out a window into the dying storm and is gone. The Assassin in White has been driven off.

Dalinar sits in the wreckage of the top room afterwards, breathing, with the broken Plate in pieces around him and Adolin and Renarin both kneeling over him to make sure he is whole. He is. He gets up. He goes that same evening, still bruised, to Sadeas's complex with the Kholin honor guard. He proposes a trade in front of Sadeas's own officers so it cannot be quietly refused. Oathbringer — his Shardblade, irreplaceable, a national treasure — for the lives, contracts, and freedom of every bridgeman in Sadeas's camp. Sadeas accepts contemptuously and watches Dalinar walk out of his audience hall without a Blade for the first time in thirty years. Dalinar folds the freed bridgemen into the Kholin household guard the same night, hands Kaladin the captaincy of his personal bodyguard, and — quietly, to no one in particular — accepts that one war just ended and another has begun.