(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kaladin hesitates outside the Windrunner quartermaster's office, listening — the Wind urging him to keep moving — and hurries into the next room with Syl. There he finds Skar, one of Sigzil's two captainlords (with Lopen), running a new cohort through camp setup: half male and half female, more darkeyes than light, including a woman in her fifties he tries to imagine off her hearth and finds himself sympathetic to. The recruits are practising bedrolls and camouflage nets, treating the wide stone room as a field. Skar is walking the perimeter, picking up every spear they have leaned against the wall, and quietly tossing it out the third-storey window. The squires, busy with their camps, do not notice. He has given them four warnings.

Skar explains the lesson with the easy thoroughness of a born sergeant. A soldier keeps a spear with him at all times; you cannot leave weapons sitting around, and an attack can come at any moment. Also responsibility. Also obeying orders. Kaladin asks if any of the squires have quietly picked up an honorspren while he was not looking; Skar has not seen any, though the one trailing Dabbid said others were on the way. A rare grey-blue solemnityspren spirals up around Kaladin as he watches them — almost an invisible serpent — and he names his real reason for coming: he wants Skar to look out for Sigzil as his sergeant. Skar agrees, then adds that Sig has Lopen beside him too. He searches Kaladin's face and asks where he is going. Somewhere dangerous? Not supposed to be, Kaladin says, but Wit has implied something — that Kaladin might not be coming back. Skar tells him he was there when the storms tried to claim him once and they cut down a corpse that turned out to be alive: there is more than a bit of the wind to Kaladin, and the east wind sees tomorrow before anyone else does. Kaladin reminds him he cannot see the future; Skar only shrugs and tosses another spear.

Skar gives Kaladin the sergeant's stare Teft could have given and tells him to go say goodbye to the others — they have a party tonight for Rlain getting his spren, and Drehy is due back from Shadesmar with Highprince Adolin and Radiant Shallan about an hour before midnight in Azimir. The recruits finally notice their spears are missing; Skar doubles his pace until one of them grabs hers tight as a mother with a newborn, bellows that they are under attack and must form ranks, and watches the chaos he has just unleashed with the wink of a man who enjoys his work too much. Kaladin and Syl edge out around the running cohort, and out in the corridor Syl cocks her head: well, they have fetched his things; now they need to fetch hers. She has things? She grins and flies off.

Far away, in Shadesmar, Shallan crashes into the bead ocean. The beads — smaller than spheres, like beads from a necklace — surge against her Stormlight, suffocating her in their undertow. Her old terror of this place rises (the first visions of it she had as a girl, tangled into what she did to her mother and to Testament). Inside her, the emotions and memories make a vine-snarled mess; fortunately, she has Radiant. Radiant surfaces and takes over: feels along the beads, hears each one whispering of what it represents in the Physical Realm, and uses the impression of a building to knit a bead-mesh platform that rises with her on top. Drehy swoops in carrying Adolin and drops him to the platform; Shallan emerges from inside long enough to kiss her husband in front of everyone. Drehy tells Radiant this was not the usual Heavenly One engagement of scout-and-break-off — this was a full attack meant to kill — and reports the plan: he has dropped the Cryptics and Pattern into the beads where they can hide and where the Fused cannot take spren hostages, left Gallant on his Lashing because the enemy will not care about a horse, told the squires to disengage and split up around the river isthmus as a landmark. Radiant approves; it is the move of an enemy advertising no fight. She sees lights on the horizon and starts to ask about them.

Two Heavenly Ones erupt from the beads next to the platform, having used the ocean as cover. Radiant fends one off with her fists; the second grabs the back of her coat and flings her into the beads — more effective than cutting her, which she would heal from — as the first slams into Drehy. The platform disintegrates beneath Adolin. The second Fused drags Radiant under, the red light of his eyes refracted a thousand times in the glass around them, until her back hits something hard and the beads peel away into a small cavern with the two of them alone, walls and floor of beads. He pins her by the shoulders and explains, with heavily accented Alethi: the beads hate the Fused's light, but they obey when he holds it — the same way they obey her Stormlight. Radiant tries to push free and finds she is no stronger of body than Shallan is — inside, a girl of nineteen with no Blade in hand. From beneath, a thought rises: her weapon has never been a Blade.

The Fused names himself Abidi the Monarch, promises to rule this world and to keep Lightweavers specifically alive to bleed for him, because his brothers and sisters have gone mad with the length of their lives and he stays sane only because he bathes in the blood of Radiants. He pulls a knife and stabs her in the shoulder to start. Radiant whispers within Shallan: are you ready? She is — she became ready when she confronted Veil and her memories. What are the Words? She has spoken them already. Speak them again. So she does. She tells Abidi the Monarch that she is afraid: of everything; of the world; of what might happen to her family; most of all of herself; always has been. Some of the beads around her tremble like things alive. The cavern starts to glow. The light is coming from her eyes. A Radiant figure of Stormlight forms behind Abidi the Monarch — taller than Shallan, biceps and neck of a fighter, braided rather than messy-bunned, a Shardblade in hand — and he laughs that an illusion will not distract him until the Blade runs him through from behind and orange blood spills onto his white outfit. A real wound. From a real blade. Shallan hisses that reality is what she decides it to be.