POV: adolin
Summary
Adolin is being armored on the cobbled square outside the Azimir dome — sabatons, greaves, cuisses, breastplate locked into place, the joy of wearing his Plate again after the long crossing through Shadesmar. Maya speaks to him through their bond, no need yet to isolate his thoughts; he finds a quiet thrill in this freedom that not every Radiant bond grants. Each chapter scar he carries from the Shadesmar fight, including the one a Radiant healer could not erase because he thought too much about it. Strange business, this Radiance.
May Aladar reports as the armorers work: she wants the first row of buildings to the east as the medical facility, both because they sit on top of a saferoom — an old smuggler's cellar slated as an emergency bolt-hole for Yanagawn — and because a single budding Radiant healer can stabilize the most desperate wounded for the surgeons. Her own ward Rahel is the Radiant: not an Edgedancer but a Truthwatcher, quietly trained in Regrowth by Radiant Precilia, terrified of combat but willing to hold a hospital. Adolin sends his sincere thanks and notes the saferoom location for himself.
Old comrades from the Shattered Plains arrive to back-slaps: Gerenor, Isalor, Kappak. He gives each command of a battalion of over six hundred, instructs them to take Colot's word as his own but to move on their own judgment when they must. He puts May Aladar in command of an archery platoon — twenty of Colot's best — over her stunned objection, on the rationale that her father has named her heir and she will need battlefield experience; May dashes off to find appropriate clothing, all principles of efficiency abandoned. He quietly slots Beam Dorset in as her second and Talig as head sergeant, both former Jasnah guards, on the interior balcony with the Azish archers. May's ward Kaminah he promotes on the spot to aide-de-camp; May's younger ward Gitora, training as an engineer, he sends to check the inner balcony can hold his weight in Plate.
He clomps up the stairs to the dome's interior balcony, Gitora returning to confirm both that the balcony will hold and that the Azish Shardbearer is already up there stomping around. From the railing he can see, on the flat stone plateau below, the central control building of the Oathgate — a chamber for thirty or so — and the Imperial Guard formed in their tight ring with crossbowmen close, Azish soldiers filling the controlroom doorways with wooden slats so a Soulcaster in masked finery can turn the rising water into bronze. Maya reports from the bead-ocean on the other side: hundreds of stormforms and roughly equal direforms, Voidlight-rich Fused including Heavenly Ones still circling, Oathgate spren fully corrupted and serving the enemy.
The control building flashes. Soulcast bronze vanishes to Shadesmar where the enemy can shove it aside. Voidspren burst from the building on ribbons of red light — scouts, Adolin knows from other battlefields. He has Kaminah spanreed a warning to Kushkam that the enemy will now know exactly where his lines are, and a recommendation to pull the Azish back into a wider ring. Two minutes later the scouting Voidspren return and the control building flashes a second time — no troops yet, but Kushkam has not pulled back.
Adolin waits, sweating, the Plate keeping him strangely cool. May arrives in a uniform with her archers in formation. He uses the time to gird himself mentally to become a killer again: he hates this part of battle now, has hated it since Sadeas's betrayal at the Tower, and feels the dueling court he loved made a mockery of by the butchery of the field. It does not slow him down. The third flash comes around the control building. It begins.