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Down in a chasm well clear of the new Bridge Four recruits — Lopen posted as a one-armed lookout farther down the passage — Kaladin runs the first measured tests of his abilities for Sigzil. The bridge clerk opens a ledger of glyphs (a thing only his Azish upbringing and the foreign make-up of the audience allow him to do without blasphemy) and counts seconds while Kaladin breathes in a single sphere's worth of Light and paints it onto a stone like luminescent ink before pressing it to the wall. Rock dangles from one until he drops; the baseline that ends up mattering is the unloaded one — about a minute and a half on a single chip's worth of Light — and Sigzil starts immediately listing the things he cannot measure: no clock; no way to know how much Light a gem holds when cut differently; no way to know how much Light the gem has bled off in the days since the last storm; nothing he can sharpen into the precise answers his old master taught him to seek. Rock notices and bows gravely to small purple spren only he and Kaladin can see, gathered around the stuck stone, and explains to Sigzil that he is *alaii'iku* and Sigzil is, regrettably, blinded by lowland air. On Lopen's suggestion they try the experiment that matters: Kaladin paints adhesion onto the wall and presses Lopen against it, and the Herdazian stays there by the back of his uniform, grinning, for as long as the Light holds. Lopen is delighted and immediately wants more.

They escalate to a sparring bout, three on one, while Kaladin tries to learn to fight using these new tools. He sticks Sigzil's spear to Rock's in a cross, sticks Lopen's to a pile of refuse, sticks Sigzil's own foot to the chasm floor by painting an arc of Light with the bare toe of his unshod foot, and sticks Lopen to the wall again. Rock surprises him by swinging an entire small tree at his head; they collide and roll into a wrestling match in the moss in which Kaladin glues Rock to the ground one limb at a time. Afterward he finds that he can draw a portion of his own Light back out of the stone — not all of it, but some — and notices, in the quiet, that the scrape he took rolling away from Rock's log has already healed without his thinking about it. He concludes the bout was not particularly efficient — he would have done better with a spear and the simple speed Stormlight lends — but it is the right kind of inefficient: practice. He needs to know these powers as well as he knows his spear, which is going to mean finding someone able to match him on this side. Lopen complains, throughout, about being left stuck to a wall and his metaphorical missing hand making rude gestures.

Teft picks his way down the chasm and reports that the new recruits, brought here for the first time, are visibly opening up under Drehy's instruction — they had needed to be invited into the place Bridge Four was forged before they could become part of it. Teft presses: someone in Bridge Four needs proper instruction on the orders of Knights Radiant and Teft himself cannot give it; the people he might have asked are dead because of something he will not name. He fields Kaladin's deflected question — what if a king somewhere were to try to refound the Knights Radiant — by saying the old Radiants were not what people say, but that no one is going to listen to that until someone proves it by Surgebinding in front of them. People will hate the person who does it. Syl folds her arms in midair — *you promised* — and Kaladin admits to himself, and to her, that he is going to. Not yet. He wants more practice first.

They climb back up onto the plateau just east of the warcamps. The change is something Kaladin is still not used to: he carries his spear out into the daylight, the Kholin guards at the approach salute him as crisply as they would a general, and a darkeyed soldier — almost certainly a survivor of the Tower — calls out to ask if he has heard. A hero, the soldier says, has come to the Plains to meet with Brightlord Kholin — and gives a name. The name freezes Kaladin in place. He nearly drops his spear, ignores Rock's call behind him, and runs through the camp toward Dalinar's command complex with Syl streaking after him.

He stumbles to a stop outside the steps to Dalinar's bunkered complex. The banner is there above a knot of soldiers. On the steps, Dalinar clasps hands with a tall square-faced man in a pristine uniform — *Old friend, it's been too long* — and the newcomer summons his Shardblade from where, he says lightly, he took it from an assassin who dared try to kill him in the field. The Blade is etched with flames in motion and, to Kaladin's eyes, runs red. The names of dead men crash through his head — Dallet, Coreb, Reesh, a squad before time, from another life. The man holding the Blade is Highlord Amaram. The hero Dalinar has been waiting for is the man who took that Blade off Kaladin, murdered his squad to keep the theft quiet, branded him a slave, and sold him into the bridges.

End of Part One.