(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Adolin comes awake in a shiver of cold ice beside the cracked hip of the thunderclast he killed — half in his shattered Plate, pulled free using Neziham's Blade — and refuses to look at his right leg. May takes his face in her hands. The leg ends at the knee. The young Truthwatcher Rahel is crying that she couldn't reach further. *A more experienced Radiant at Urithiru can give you your leg back,* May tells him, with the calm officers are trained for; Adolin pushes the shock down and asks the only question he can: *the city?* May gives him the report. Dome breached. Archers driven off the balcony. Kushkam last seen holding the gap, then gone. Firebombs likely dropped inside. Dozens of Fused already loose in the streets before the flames.

Adolin orders the Plate off, ignores May's protest about his leg, and is carried between Hmask and another soldier toward the breach. He is the most experienced field commander left; he must give orders if Kushkam has fallen. They limp through the medical quarter into a plaza full of corpses — hundreds, mostly singers — and find an unlikely reinforcement already there: Yanagawn himself, dressed for battle with a sword drooping in his fingers, his honor guard refusing to leave him. *We found them like this,* the emperor says, dazed. *I didn't arrive in time for whatever this is.*

They count eight separate varieties of dead Fused — gemhearts crushed, chests ripped open or smashed — and find Kushkam alive in the pile, painspren marking him out. Rahel runs to heal him. Adolin, Hmask, and Yanagawn climb the carnage to its highest point, a pinnacle of bodies heaped against the breach in the dome the way troops once heap themselves trying to bring down a Shardbearer. At the top they find two. Taln kneels speared by a dozen lances that prop up his corpse, his hand still closed on the crushed skull of a Fused, face tipped to the sky. Leaning back against him, a chipped sword in her lap, Ash is smiling. She bleeds from two dozen hits. *This time,* she whispers to Adolin, *I won't let him go alone.* Then her eyes close and she falls still. Awespren burst around Adolin in blue. Colot arrives at last with real reinforcements; he sets them to hold the breach a respectful distance from the heat, and inside the dome Abidi and his shaken singers do not press out. Azimir will last another day, at a price Adolin cannot yet count.

A continent away in time, Dalinar is at a parley. Two armies displayed too aggressively to be on the verge of fighting. A small open-sided pavilion between them in which a small group is meeting under refreshments. He Connects them in among the talkers — Navani and Gav beside him — and finds maps annotated to ruin and Regal singers across the table from grey-robed ardents writing for the Radiants. This is the False Desolation: singers with forms of power and no Odium but Mishram behind them, demanding two more singer kingdoms be carved from the land near Iri. The Windrunner Garith — older now, grey at the temples, a decade closer to Feverstone Keep — sits down and tells them they cannot promise land they do not yet have. The direform femalen across from him answers that her god will not accept a treaty without the land. The singers withdraw in warpairs, the way listeners once did.

The Radiants pull seats. One by one they put hands on Garith's — *you've held us together, I didn't believe you could, but you did it.* Dalinar reaches across to add his own. Then he raises Garith's real problem to him. *They have their god. The aggression she inspires worries me.* And: *I'd feel better if I knew more of what to expect from our side.* All eyes turn to Melishi at the back. The Bondsmith does not give. *Honor does not interfere any longer.* Garith tells the table that Mishram is more reasonable than Odium ever was; the Radiants reply that no one has fought Odium in thousands of years. He stands. Sincerityspren unfold around him in blue fronds. *We're closer to a treaty than we seem. Just give me time.* They give it to him. He leaves the pavilion with a small wing of Windrunners and flies away.

Melishi approaches Dalinar under Garith's borrowed name, *Naze*. *Tonight is the night. We know where he'll be. Same place as last time, though we were too late. Are you in?* Dalinar says yes — a line of light bursts into existence Connecting him to Melishi — and the setting warps. He is prone on cold stone beside Navani, Gav, Melishi, and Kalak under a blanket of fallen leaves, hidden in a hollow before a stone clearing where Windrunners glow down through first-moon light. Garith paces the rocks, worried. *I've known that feeling,* Dalinar thinks idly. *I've been that man.* And in that thought he Connects too strongly, and is suddenly standing in Garith's place. The other Windrunners glance at him. Three singers emerge from the shadows. The direform femalen from the parley comes right up to him, studies him, softens her humming — and bends forward, takes his head in her hands, and kisses him.