POV: kaladin
Summary
A week after Amaram's arrival in the warcamps, Kaladin reports to the Kholin lighteyes' sparring grounds with Moash, Drehy, and five other guards — a mix of Bridge Four men and survivors of the old Cobalt Guard who have accepted him as captain without complaint. The yard is the familiar shape of every officers' practice ground he has stood in since his days under Amaram: a sanded courtyard ringed by a covered walkway, one-room buildings tucked under the eaves for storage and bathing. The walls are recent stonework, reinforced eastward against the storms — one more sign that the warcamps are no longer temporary. Moash grumbles that the lighteyes' grounds look exactly like the darkeyes' grounds, and Kaladin tells him the only thing that makes the place special is that bridgemen are not normally in it.
He posts Drehy on the roof, scatters the rest of his men around the perimeter, and sets Moash at the gate to inspect the parshmen porters and any servant carrying a tray within knife's reach of the princes. A senior ardent tries to wave them off until Kaladin points out the racks of practice weapons and two unbonded Shardblades in use on the sands. She tells him the blades are the King's Blades — one Elhokar's, one his father's — lent out under a long Alethi tradition that any lighteyes of rank be trained against Shards in case a Shardbearer falls in battle. Kaladin notes drily what a clever trick it is to bait ambitious lighteyes into harder practice by dangling a Blade in front of them, and the ardent stalks off. Moash reminds him he is the one who told the men to mind their tongues with lighteyes.
Moash then turns on him about Amaram: he has seen the way Kaladin's face changes whenever the name comes up. Kaladin tells him the man was his old commander and that the brand on his forehead is Amaram's work. Moash is grimly satisfied that the storied hero is no hero at all; he takes Kaladin by the arm, angerspren boiling up around him like pools of blood in the sand, and swears that one day they will get back at the men who did this — Amaram, Sadeas, all of them. Kaladin meets his eyes and nods, and Moash jogs off to his post with the promise sealed between them.
Syl worries at him while he walks his circuit. She has seen the strange red-lightning spren again, hard to spot and only visible to her; he has not. He tells her about the second countdown glyph someone scrawled inside Dalinar's rooms during the last storm — pointing to the same date a little over a month away — and admits he cannot tell whether Dalinar is writing them himself during his fits or whether something he cannot see is slipping past his guards. Syl presses him on Dalinar being Amaram's friend; he tries to brush her off, until she rises in front of him as a tiny thunderhead with lightning at her feet and demands he stop lying to her. He breathes, then concedes: Dalinar is not Amaram. The man gave up his Blade. Syl tells him he should take what he knows to Dalinar; Kaladin answers that no highprince is going to listen to a branded slave accuse a lighteyes of the third dahn of murdering his own men and stealing the Shardblade he then refused.
Adolin and Renarin finally arrive in full Shardplate, escorted by Skar and the last of the Cobalt Guard for the formal change of watch. Adolin, smarting at being told he is not in Kaladin's chain of command, steps close enough that his gauntleted finger taps Kaladin's chest, growls that he owes him his life and that is the only reason the bridgeman is not already through a window, and warns him there is something off about him he cannot place. He tells Kaladin to focus on Renarin and clinks off across the sand. Renarin stands stiff in Dalinar's unpainted dark-steel Plate, the Blade Adolin won him in the duel still in five-day bonding limbo at his hip. The brothers cross to the senior ardent and bow formally to her — to a slave, Syl points out, that their father owns — and join a knot of grey-robed teachers at the back of the yard. Renarin must now be chosen by a swordmaster, a step the system normally completes for a lighteyed boy by the age of ten.
A long-haired, scruffily bearded man in loose ardent robes stands cross-armed under the eaves, watching the princelings with the focused attention of a soldier sizing up a target. Kaladin drifts over to check him, foot deliberately scraping sand as warning; the man spins with the chained menace of someone who has just decided not to strike, then turns away. His eyes are brown and unsettlingly old for a face that has not aged into them. He gives his name as Zahel, identifies Kaladin as the bridgeman who saved the highprince, and tells him not to bother prying — he is not going to hurt anyone's Damnation prince. He explains that Renarin has never trained because of some health problem, and that the masters will probably not be brave enough to refuse a highprince's son. From the sand, Adolin calls *Swordmaster Zahel* down to the ardents' circle by name. Zahel sighs that he is probably not brave enough either, mutters that he will try not to hurt the lad too much, and goes. Syl settles on Kaladin's shoulder, informs him that only Rock treats her with the deference a god deserves, and grins that she is in fact a very little piece of one and he may bow. He goes to meet Lopen and Shen at the gate for the day's reports from Teft.