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Kaladin stands the highstorm watch in Elhokar's sitting room at the top of the Pinnacle while the wind throws itself against the shutters in fits — distant howl, tremble, violent rattle, water seeping in at the joints. Two steady red lights hold in the rain outside the worst-fitted shutter; for some reason he cannot explain, Kaladin reads them as eyes. He has his hand halfway to the latch before Elhokar's petulant complaint about loose carpentry breaks the spell and the lights fade. The king paces; Adolin sits by the hearth turning pages in a sketchbook; Renarin sits beside him repeatedly opening, rubbing, and clicking shut a small metal box, staring at nothing as he does; Captain Idrin of the King's Guard, dark-skinned and full-bearded, holds his post. The hearth is no fire but a heating fabrial built around a fist-sized ruby Navani made herself — wealth enough, Kaladin thinks, to feed his home village for weeks. Dalinar and Navani are spending the storm together in the windowless side chamber that opens only off this room; if a new countdown glyph appears on its walls, Kaladin will know no one slipped past him to write it.

Wandering the room under the pretext of inspecting the gemstone, Kaladin glimpses Adolin's book — finely drawn fashion plates — and asks, without meaning to, whether the prince really spends a highstorm choosing new clothes. Adolin snaps the book shut and asks the bridgeman to leave him and Renarin out of his fussing; Kaladin answers that a highstorm is exactly when an assassin would strike, with the winds covering noise and help slow to come, and the king himself agrees and wonders why no one has ever told him that before. When the storm passes, Kaladin opens the window onto Nomon-touched cloud-wrack and a black sky. Dalinar and Navani emerge from the side chamber; the walls are clean. Dalinar tells his sons quietly that the vision was a repeat in the wrong order, and notices Kaladin listening and changes the subject.

Talk turns to Adolin's stalled duelling. Every full Shardbearer in the camps has now refused him, so he intends to challenge two lesser men — Talanor with a Blade only and Kalishor with Plate only. Dalinar reveals he is courting Highlord Amaram to secede from Sadeas and bring his Shards into the Kholin princedom; the move has not been made in over a decade, but Amaram is the only general in Sadeas's camp worth the effort. Kaladin suggests the duels need a point — pick fights that drive at Sadeas specifically, force the middle ranks to see the cost of his betrayal — and Dalinar agrees. Even hearing Amaram's name puts Kaladin out of sorts; he wants something to *happen* now that the man is in camp, and nothing does.

He sends Moash and Bisig back to barracks to sleep — Moash has pulled two shifts, dividing his time between Navani's door and training with the King's Guard — and posts Natam and Mart on Navani's door with Leyten keeping Moash's station. Then he asks Dalinar for a word in private and goes ahead to the palace front while the highprince walks Navani to her room. Syl spins in through one window as mist and spirals around him laughing — she always grows more sprenlike right after a storm. He stops outside the palace doors above the switchbacks and tries to rehearse what he is about to say. He is not ready when Dalinar emerges.

On the switchback down to the stables, by spherelight, Kaladin tells Dalinar what he has never told anyone in full: a year ago he was in Amaram's army, and the Blade Amaram now wears Kaladin himself took off the Shardbearer he killed; Amaram kept the Shards by having his personal guard slaughter Kaladin's squad and branding the lone witness *shash* before selling him as a slave. Dalinar tells him Amaram is the most unimpeachably honourable man he knows and demands proof; Kaladin gives him the only names he has — the personal guards, and a peak-faced stormwarden with an ardent's beard who was there — and grits out that this is not a matter of his being a darkeyes. Dalinar tells him to hold his tongue and not to repeat the accusation to anyone, that he will speak to Amaram himself; warns him he is walking a line between usefulness and insubordination because of the chip on his shoulder; and sends him on alone. He turns back up the path toward Navani's rooms to think.

Syl lands on Kaladin's shoulder and tells him gently that this is not who he is supposed to be. *You're not a Skybreaker, Kaladin,* she says — and names, for the first time, the order he is in danger of becoming if he goes hunting his own justice. She remembers, from before, a man on a battlefield who fought differently than this. *That man is dead,* he answers; he has to figure out who he is now.

At the Bridge Four fire, Rock is dishing out late stew to the men on odd shifts. Bisig and the others are chatting fondly about how they miss the bridge itself, as a soldier misses his spear. Lopen introduces a new spearman: his *cousin* Punio, a Herdazian who walked out of Roion's army on his annual trip home and has now sworn to Kholin instead — Herdazians, Lopen shrugs, all look the same and nobody back home will remember which one Punio was. Kaladin sighs and tells him to pretend he has been Bridge Four from the start. Then Shen squats down in front of him at the firepit and uses more words than Kaladin has heard from him in months: he is not Bridge Four, he is its slave, because he has no spear. Kaladin cannot give him one — the lighteyes barely tolerate Bridge Four as it is — and tells him so. *A slave I am, then,* Shen says, and withdraws. Kaladin knocks his head back against the stone and asks himself, the way he was asked at the bridges, whether being a well-treated slave was ever enough for him. He gets two bites of stew down before Natam comes pelting into the camp red-faced and panting. *The king!* he gasps. *An assassin.*