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Part Three opens with Adolin on a near plateau just past the eastern crater rim of the warcamps, wearing Plate without the helm, hair blowing in the morning breeze. He hurls his Blade over and over toward a rock formation and watches it shatter to white mist most of the way there — he has mastered most Blade commands, but never had to practice the one that keeps a thrown weapon together, because throws are forbidden in duels. His left shoulder and side are a mass of bruises from being slammed into a wall the night before, his head still aches, and he had stayed up outside his father's room in Plate, chewing ridgebark, refusing to be caught helmless again. He is sour at himself, sour at the situation, sour at the three Bridge Four guards trailing him whose laughable presence would do nothing against the Assassin in White, and sour at the rational part of his own mind asking whether he means to wear Plate forever. He notes uncomfortably that Kaladin had been suspiciously effective in the fight last night — more effective than he had — and that there is something strange about that man he cannot name. Eventually one throw holds; the Blade flashes end over end and sinks to the hilt in stone. He dismisses it and heads back toward the warcamps.

Outside the eastern wall he intercepts an unusual daylight procession: a circle of chanting ardents surrounding parshmen who carry tall poles strung with rippling silk, screening something forty feet across from view. Soulcasters do not normally come out by day. Inside the screen he finds Kadash — Dalinar's chief ardent, square-bearded, scars on his shaven head betraying the soldier he once was — supervising five red-robed Soulcasters whose eyes sparkle like gemstones and whose skin has begun to crack and smooth into something like living stone. Kadash explains, nervous, that demand for buildings, food and waste removal can no longer be met at night alone; Dalinar has authorised double-shift rotation of the fabrials earlier in the week, which means training multiple ardents on each instrument — a prospect the red-robed five regard with unreadable, almost-alien expressions. The five chant in harmony with the outer ring, raise their hands together, and a great stone wall springs into being with a moment of coalescing mist and a sudden inward suck of wind, bulging the silk outward — a windbreak, the first of many Dalinar has been wanting on the construction plateaus. One of the Soulcasters' fabrials has gone dark; a gemstone shattered.

Adolin uses the moment to press Kadash on what is actually recorded of the old Knights Radiant. Kadash is cagey — the Recreance and the Church's later land-grab are still embarrassments — until Adolin says directly that the Assassin in White has returned, that the man walked on walls and fell a hundred feet without injury, that he was like a Voidbringer given form. Kadash, face draining of colour, says those abilities and more were ascribed to the Radiants, that he had once spoken with soldiers from the night the old king was killed and thought trauma had embellished their accounts. He promises to read, and to bring back whatever is known about how such a creature can be fought. If the assassin is truly doing what the Radiants did, he whispers, the orders are not dead.

The second scene moves to Navani on a twenty-five-foot observation tower above Dalinar's engineering yards in the warcamp. She loves warcamps — the order of them, the rows of barracks, the constraint of shops to marketplaces — and tells herself that careful planning is the water that nourishes innovation. She is flanked by Rushu (an unfairly pretty ardent reading distractedly about flamespren and digressing on why women should not, by symmetry, have beards), the ancient engineer Falilar, a handful of other ardent scholars and Matain and a few of his stormwardens (whose numerology she does not entirely trust and wants to keep where she can see them). Below, a tall scaffolded tower carries on its top a flat archer parapet ringed with crenellated dummies; on the ground beside it sits a thick wooden square. Ardents on top engage the fabrials and unlatch the sides; workers roll the supports away; the square should fall, the parapet should not. Instead the *square* hangs impossibly in the air with only two slack pulley ropes attaching it to the ground. Crank-men below haul it down and the archer parapet, with the wobbling resistance of something being hoisted, rises into the air without supports until it sways at the top. It holds.

Adolin clomps up the steps still in Plate, having drifted past the guard line on his rank, and asks if the platform is *flying* — and immediately he is troubled, because the resemblance to the way the assassin had moved through gravity is too close. Navani sends the scholars down to inspect the gemstones and explains the trick to Adolin in layman's terms: split a fabrial gemstone and link the halves so they mirror — like a spanreed — and they move together, but split them another way and the halves move in opposite directions. The reverser-paired gems are seated in the floor of the parapet and the matching halves in the wooden square. The structural problem has been protecting the gems against the multiplied strain of simultaneous infusion drain and physical stress, but they are nearly there; the immediate goal is to roll a square out onto the Plains, engage by spanreed, and shoot a platform of archers fifty feet up where no enemy can climb or topple them. She is less excited than Adolin is, because the technique can do much more than that and the ardents are already imagining bigger things; she is, she says, only their patron — they suffer her, mostly, though she sees a future in which more Plate-like fabrials could be made to protect her family.

He notices her glove over her safehand — practical, she says, the way darkeyed women manage it, and being dowager queen no one can stop her being eccentric — and they start down for the palace meeting the highprinces have demanded after the night's attack. Adolin gathers his nerve, blushing, and asks aloud whether she has been *encouraging* his father's advances. She tells him plainly that the encouragement was entirely hers and that she practically had to seduce the man — Dalinar is certainly stubborn — and accepts cheerfully that this makes a hash of his father's argument for the Codes by way of social honour. She lets bothersome traditions slip and expects others to keep theirs; *of course.* For now Adolin is free of his own causal, since Jasnah has gone wherever Jasnah goes; the ship is said to be lost with all hands but Navani has refused to take that as more than a delay. *I'm not sulking,* Adolin says, sulking, and they go to the palace.