(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

In a meeting room high in Urithiru, Kaladin finds Dalinar at a window looking out across the snowfields of the Ur mountain range and Szeth seated in the corner with his long silver-sheathed Shardblade across his lap, eyes closed, head freshly shaved, dressed once more in white. Syl walks up to the silent assassin and stares into his face to check whether he is peeking. Dalinar asks Kaladin how he feels about his next assignment, and Kaladin answers as a man trying a new shape: Wit has told him the world will be different ten days from now and he needs a new place in it, so he is willing to try being a surgeon of the mind instead of a soldier. Dalinar reports that the men Kaladin has been treating for battle shock are improving remarkably, and Kaladin sums up his working method: take a person from the darkness and show them that light still exists.

Dalinar then tells Kaladin that the promised companion for his trip is Szeth. The Shin assassin, without opening his eyes, says he is returning home to right what is wrong, to cleanse an evil there — a crusade of righteous cause that should bring him the Fourth Ideal of the Skybreakers (see the Ideals), the step before the fifth, in which a man becomes the law itself. He had wished to go alone; Dalinar has insisted otherwise. Kaladin pulls Dalinar aside and hisses that Szeth is the opposite of a stable patient — he is the patient who needs months of treatment, not a quest — and that Kaladin has had success exactly once, with men whose suffering he shares, and cannot promise to replicate it for an extreme case. Dalinar asks if he is up to it anyway. They agree to step outside.

Dalinar tucks a small wooden box under his arm, leaves Szeth alone — the assassin notes mildly that he is never alone, that even without spren or sword he has the voices — and leads Kaladin not into the next room but up the stairs to the roof of Urithiru. Kaladin has not been up here since he threw himself off. He walks to the railing with Syl in real wind and remarks on the warmth; Syl credits Navani's bond to the awakened tower and predicts that the city will flourish again. Syl asks whether his family being in Urithiru makes the tower his home now, and concedes a point — his other home is in the hands of the enemy, but also in the hands of the singers, whose claim on it Kaladin can grudgingly understand from the inside of his own slave brands.

Dalinar asks Kaladin to fly him to the tallest peak in view — a spike like the largest point of a crown — and Kaladin Lashes them up, his armor spren swirling around him. The transition out of Urithiru's halo of warmth is gradual; the Towerlight he drew at the tower fails as they leave its corona and he has to switch to Stormlight from his pouch. At altitude he holds a small invisible bubble of thicker air around the two of them — a nebulous extension of his powers that he has been doing instinctively but wants to be more deliberate about. Coldspren sprout in tiny crystalline spikes around his feet as they crunch into the deep snow. Dalinar picks up a handful — Navani has told him some of the deeper snow here is ancient, layered like strata of stone, because at this altitude it never melts.

Studying the tower from outside, Dalinar tells Kaladin he wants to end the cycle of war humanity has fought against the singers since their first generations on this world. He admits doubts: should one man hold the authority he does? Jasnah has been planting ideas in his head like cremlings wintering inside a plant. The world did not decide on this contest; he did. Was there a better way? He concedes Kaladin's objections about Szeth — yes, he is a hard case, yes, Kaladin has only just begun this work — and answers them anyway: they need to stop discarding people they fear are defective. He invokes the Dalinar-Szeth history directly: when Kaladin once saved him from this assassin, that was one kind of rescue; now he is asking for a different kind. Save Szeth and save the Herald Ishar, because this is the end and Dalinar has no other options.

Kaladin yields. He warns Dalinar that Wit has told him he will not return in time to fight at his side, and that Wit thinks Ishar cannot help Dalinar in the way Dalinar wants. Dalinar grunts and presses for the rest: that the Wind has been speaking to Kaladin — some form of it that is a spren — and told him to listen. Dalinar takes that gratefully. Then he gives Kaladin the rest of the warning he has been holding: Ishar is in Shinovar, which means he has the Honorblades — every weapon as dangerous as the one Szeth used. Ishar thinks he is the true champion, or perhaps the Almighty himself; he raised an army in Tukar before going to Shinovar, a kingdom that has been suspiciously quiet through the whole war. By Sigzil's reports, he has been pulling spren bodily out of Shadesmar into twisted half-flesh and killing them by it. Dalinar needs Kaladin's eyes on that land and his judgement watching his back, because Szeth cannot be trusted with nuance.

Syl commits the two of them aloud, drawing an odd look from Dalinar — he is not used to honorspren visibly negotiating on their Radiant's behalf. Then Dalinar adds the second thing he came for. He opens the small wooden box and unfolds a sheet of paper covered in script. His sons have both declined to be named his heirs to any throne he might claim; Jasnah's focus is restoring Alethkar, with Gavinor her heir to that throne. Urithiru is separate, and has no Radiant heir. Renarin is bonded to a corrupted spren and can see futures he refuses; Adolin flat-out refuses for his own reasons. Dalinar asks Kaladin to be the heir to Urithiru should he and Navani both fall. Syl gasps; pale yellow shockspren burst around Kaladin, and he refuses the document on the ground that he is broken. Dalinar answers: life breaks people, and they fill the cracks with something stronger. If Kaladin refuses, Dami — the Riran Stoneward who just spoke the fourth oath after Emul — is next; if Dami refuses, the Alethi highprinces Aladar and, God Beyond help them, Sebarial after that. Dalinar confesses he hopes for something better in the longer run — perhaps the representational government Jasnah has been writing essays about. He will accept Kaladin's answer, but he asks for the courtesy of time before it. Kaladin folds the letter into his pocket and agrees to think about it. It still feels, he thinks as the snow crunches under his boots, like a betrayal.