(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

On guard duty in the king's conference chamber at the Pinnacle while the highstorm hammers the rock above, Kaladin dozes and finds himself dreaming the storm itself — surging over the land as a cleansing fury, lightning his inspiration, thunder his heartbeat. The dream's familiarity wakes inside him: he has been here before. Turning, he finds the Stormfather's face filling the sky behind him. The presence names him Son of Honor, says Syl trusts him but should not, and tells him in regretful grief that he will become a traitor and will murder his spren and leave her corpse to wicked men. *I will not!* Kaladin shouts. *Men change. All men.* Below him he sees ships rolling in sheltered harbors, armies huddled in valleys of many hills, a great lake retreating into holes in the rock as the storm advances. Then a second tempest rises at the horizon, red-lightninged and impossibly vast, dwarfing the continent. *He comes, little traitor,* the Stormfather says. *I am sorry.*

Kaladin jerks awake to Adolin smirking at him for drooling on duty and for dozing through a highstorm, and to Renarin — visibly steadier now that he has bonded his Blade — questioning Adolin's earlier insistence that the Parshendi messenger he met was a woman Shardbearer. The leaking shutter trembles in its frame; Dalinar and Navani are in the side room and Elhokar in the privy. Driven by dread Kaladin throws open the balcony door and steps out into the riddens; the wind still tears at him and the rain bites his face. Standing at the iron rail he feels for a moment as though he is leaning over Braize itself.

Far to the south on the wagon road, Pattern cannot be quieted as the storm passes over Shallan's caravan. Her slaves whimper in the back; she only wants to get away and read whatever spanreed news Tyn's correspondents have brought about her homeland. Leaning close to Pattern she realizes the humming is words: *bad . . . bad . . . so bad.*

Syl streaks out of the dark onto the balcony rail in a form longer and more flowing than usual, frantic, twisting. *Kaladin. Something is wrong. He's coming. The one who hates. The darkness inside. He's watching. Something bad is going to happen.* Kaladin shoves back inside past Adolin and orders the king and his family evacuated immediately. Navani snaps at him for the intrusion; in the side room Dalinar sits distant and thoughtful on a sofa, holding her hand, speaking softly to something Kaladin cannot see — *he sees things during the storms* — and Elhokar emerges from the privy demanding to know what the babbling is about. Adolin protests loudly that the Pinnacle is the safest place in the warcamps. Dalinar's gaze clears, and on instinct alone, on a soldier's word that something is wrong, he orders them to go. The implied *for now* hangs in the air.

Kaladin posts his squad in the hall — Beld and Hobber as advance scouts down through the kitchens, Moash and a King's Guard named Ralinor as rear guard, the bridgeman brothers Mart and Eth at the king's shoulders — and hauls Elhokar by the arm into the corridor. They take the right-hand turn, away from the formal entrance and deeper into the rock burrow of the palace. The halls are silent; everyone is sheltering. Then ahead the spheres in the wall sconces are dark — drained of Stormlight — and a cold breeze blows from a black patch on the wall. A doorway has been sliced inward from the cliff face. On the floor at the crossing lies Beld in a blue uniform, eyes burned. From a side hall steps the Assassin in White, filmy whites rippling, bald and pale-skinned and Shin, dragging a long silvery Blade that cuts a furrow in the floor. Light streams from his skin. He is a Surgebinder.

Dalinar sends Renarin back with the guard to pull the king out, takes a spear, and charges with Kaladin and Adolin in a small-squad trident with himself in the middle. Behind them Elhokar's voice trails away, whimpering that he always knew the assassin would come for him as he had for Father. The assassin springs up onto the ceiling, walks down the wall, batters Adolin's Blade aside and slams a palm into his chest; Adolin streams Light and is Lashed upward to stick to the ceiling. Two spears find the assassin in the shoulder and the side; he sweeps both shafts in half with his Blade as though the wounds are nothing, his clothing healing in puffs of Stormlight. He cuffs Dalinar across the face hard enough that Stormlight could not have shrugged it off, and shears Kaladin's right forearm clean through below the elbow. The arm turns grey, lifeless; the half-spear falls from a hand that no longer feels it.

Adolin, his own Light run out, slips from the ceiling and crashes to his shoulder. The assassin steps over him — *I am sorry. I don't want to do this* — and turns up the corridor after the king. Kaladin draws what little Stormlight he has, finds the wind for a few clean strikes that score the assassin's flesh, then misreads a Shardblade thrust and barely escapes being run through. Syl whispers fiercely that the man is not a Radiant — no spren guides him — and begs Kaladin to stand. Dalinar lurches into the assassin's path, bloody-cheeked but lucid, and bellows that the man took his brother but will not have what is left of him. The assassin pauses to whisper that he is not here for Elhokar at all — he is here for the highprince — kicks Dalinar to one knee, and sweeps the Blade down in a killing arc. Dalinar catches it bare-handed, palms together. In the same instant Kaladin lunges from the side and drives the assassin into the cut opening in the wall. Both tumble out into the wet night air far above the rocks.