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At Bridge Four's firepit, a Kholin crier reads out Dalinar's new proclamation: every plateau gemheart on the Shattered Plains is now to be hunted by two highprinces working in tandem under a king-set rotation, with the spoils becoming property of the king and redistributed by his judgement of effectiveness and obedience. The piece deliberately invokes the Codes — a pointed jab at highprinces all sides know to be ignoring them. Kaladin makes the crier repeat the whole thing three times, Sigzil muttering it under his breath to memorise. Leyten predicts discontent on the day's winds; Rock, ladling out curry, greets the prospect of open riots with a delighted grin. Kaladin hands Rock a storeroom, the camp's requisition rights, and orders to train cooks for the other barracks — Bridge Four will eat like kings for a month, and the rest of the thousand survivors of the Tower will be brought up in body before they can be brought up in spirit. He picks four men for the relief shift at the king's palace and warns Teft, whose work with the other crews is going slowly. On the way out, Sigzil reminds him he has agreed — by a grunt that apparently counted as a promise — to a private round of measurements of his abilities, and goes off to find a place where they cannot be seen.

On the long walk through the camp, Kaladin catches himself white-knuckling his spear, as if some part of him still expects it to be taken away. He passes a widow on the path holding a bundle of a husband's clothing while her two too-quiet children stand beside her, and remembers that the empty barracks are doing more haunting than any Voidbringer could. Syl alights on his shoulder and notes that he no longer laughs even now that things are better. He tells her he is waiting for the thunder that always follows lightning, and that whatever those countdown glyphs on Dalinar's wall mean, life does not just continue good for him. Syl remembers, vaguely, that seeing what is to come is not of Honor — it is dangerous, and from somewhere else.

Across the warcamps in his sitting room, Torol Sadeas sits with Oathbringer driven blade-first through the middle of his wife Ialai's fine stone table and stares at his own reflection in it. Fifty. The prize he lusted after for years tastes hollow now that Dalinar — who should be dead and instead is broken-but-living — has somehow gotten the better of him. Ialai flops down beside him to report: under cover of Dalinar's recruitment drive she has placed more associates in his support staff (no soldiers — too obvious), and the other highprinces hate the proclamation exactly as anticipated. Sadeas confides that he has tired of the plateau game and wants real conquest. He will go stir Aladar and Ruthar and fan the others' indignation against Dalinar, let the kingdom fracture, and rebuild Alethkar — then Jah Keved — from blood and tears under his own Blade. Ialai's assassins, he tells her, are for the contingency in which Dalinar succeeds rather than fails.

At the top of the Pinnacle — Elhokar's own term for the hill-palace — Kaladin's squad climbs the switchbacks while he draws in unnoticed Stormlight and arrives un-winded. He stares down a King's Guard lighteyes into adding "sir" to his answer, and reminds Moash in the corridor that a soldier does not provoke fights; Moash swallows it and apologises, though the anger is not gone. Inside the king's conference chamber Kaladin puts Moash and Drehy on the balcony (a hundred feet up, Dalinar says, so unreachable; therefore exactly the way Kaladin would come in), Mart and Eth outside the doors, and presses Elhokar for any secret passages so they can be guarded too. Elhokar is impressed and wonders why Dalinar did not put this man in charge of his guard sooner. Dalinar pulls Kaladin aside about the king's healthy-but-extreme paranoia, the proper address ("Brightlord," not "sir"), and orders him to remain inside through the meeting and hear everything.

The meeting itself sets out the rest of Dalinar's strategy. Teshav reports that the highprinces are furious and that Hatham has publicly vowed to talk Elhokar into rescinding the proclamation. Adolin argues for a counter-coalition; General Khal warns that an outright civil war is unwinnable. Dalinar, staring out the window, says that the kingdom they have is not the Alethkar Gavilar envisioned anyway — children wearing their father's cloak — and that the Everstorm comes. He invites Kaladin to speak. Treat the highprinces, Kaladin suggests, like a troublesome squad — separate them where possible, disarm them where you cannot. Dalinar cannot separate them or unseat their armies, but he can take the lock off Adolin's scabbard. Freed from the Codes' prohibition on important duels among officers at war, Adolin will challenge the other camps' Shardbearers in formal bouts of honor, with the Shards themselves as the wager — Dalinar's stick to Dalinar and Navani's political feather. Elhokar warns that the other side will not duel back; they will send quiet assassins, after family first. Dalinar accepts the risk and is asked, finally, for his endgame. He says he means to refound the Knights Radiant — Teshav demands whether he has gone mad, Adolin warns him people will not hear it, and Kaladin nearly drops his spear in shock. Dalinar holds the line. He does not yet know quite why, only that he has been instructed to do it and that the Radiants stood for an ideal the present age is missing.

After the meeting Dalinar tells Kaladin in the corridor that the others will try to hurt his family — Navani, Adolin, Renarin — and that over the coming weeks the King's Guard is to be folded into the army and replaced, top-down, by trained bridgemen under Kaladin's single command, including the guard around Elhokar himself. He reveals that during a recent chasmfiend hunt the gemstones powering Elhokar's Plate very nearly failed under stress, having likely been swapped for flawed ones — an attempt the guard may itself have been complicit in. Kaladin proposes patrolling his untrained thousand across the hills outside the warcamps, where the sheer size of the force will scare off bandits without forcing his men into real combat. Dalinar agrees; the goal will eventually be regular road patrols all the way to Alethkar and the southern ports. As Dalinar walks off — Moash, Eth, and Mart falling in behind him — Kaladin turns a sphere in his pocket and runs the Immortal Words through his head: the First Ideal he already knows aloud, the Second he has reasoned out, and the three Syl will not give him until he is ready to know them, or fail. He wonders whether Dalinar knows what he is, and whether Dalinar could possibly refound the Radiants without help of exactly the kind he is hiding.