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Kaladin descends with Teft and Bridge Seventeen into Bridge Four's claimed chasms, which feel more like home now than Hearthstone would. He puts Sergeant Pitt on the spot in front of his men — they wear soldiers' uniforms but they are playing dress-up until they stop holding their spears at awkward angles and stop shuffling in line — and hands them off to Teft to make sweat. He passes Syl sitting on a closing frillbloom frond and the question she has been working up to: what does he actually *want*? *To keep my men alive.* *That was what you wanted. You can't keep watching every one like a father kurl over his eggs.* He admits, with surprising heat, that what he wants now is to beat the assassin — not only because guarding Dalinar is his job, and not only because the assassin's killing of Gavilar is what set Tien's draft in motion through Roshone's petty malice and so killed him. Earlier he had pressed Teft, gently, about where Teft had vanished to the night of the highstorm; Teft, evasive, said the market, and Kaladin let it lie. The men are not bridgemen any more; they are entitled to lives.

Deeper down he finds Sigzil, Rock and Lopen in a patch of chasm cleared of the usual wood-and-bone debris, with spheres for light. Sigzil — trained by his master to ask questions — is picking at the assassin puzzle: the Shin are xenophobic, almost never leave their land, are never mercenaries, and yet here is one of them with a Shardblade who can Surgebind and kill kings, and supposedly hired by the isolated Parshendi. The story does not stand up. Kaladin tries to run up the chasm wall and lands flat on his back. He describes what he saw the assassin do (jump and *land* on the ceiling, run down the wall, Lash Adolin upward without sticking, fly off at the end) and Lopen claims that with this kind of glow the king of all Herdaz will surely give him the king's daughter (Sigzil informs him the king has no daughter; Lopen, never having been to Herdaz since he was a baby, claims he has been lied to all his life). Sigzil catches sight of Syl sitting on the wall and yelps; she preens for the new audience, leans her face into a perfect copy of his and giggles when he flinches away, then explains airily that spren probably do have genders because that is how people perceive them — *I can think; that's good enough.* Sigzil is shaken: she talks *like a real person*; only the Nightwatcher, in the lore he knows, was said to be capable of that.

Kaladin closes his eyes, draws in Stormlight until it beats against his veins, and for a moment glimpses shadows of another world — a sun fixed inside a corridor of clouds — and *makes the direction of the wall become down*. He falls into the wall and stands up on it. He runs upward along it toward the open sky, the chasm narrowing above him into a cave-mouth; Syl streaks ahead, urges him out into the sunlight and the open plateau. He stops just short. He has to know first, he tells her, whether Dalinar is really what he seems — if even one lighteyes lives up to his reputation. *If honor is dead.* *He is. But he lives on in men. And in me.* Dalinar is friends with Amaram and could be the same inside. *You don't believe that.* He warns her he is broken. *No. You've been reforged. It can happen to men.* He promises if he can ever trust Dalinar, he will tell him what he can do and give him his Knights Radiant. Of Amaram he says only that he means to kill him. Don't let it destroy you, Syl says. *It can't. Amaram already took care of that.* His Light runs out and he falls; he draws in more in mid-air and lands feet-first in a rush of power. Rock awards a *very soft clap*; it would have been more entertaining had Kaladin fallen on his face.

Returning to Sigzil's other thread, Kaladin tells him the cut on the king's balcony rail was made with a Shardblade, but not by the Assassin in White — the attempt on the king was too crude — and must have been made after the highstorm, because otherwise the wind would have blown the cut railing out of shape. So a Shardbearer somehow got out onto that balcony after the storm. Sigzil proposes a rope smuggled out by an accomplice servant under their clothing. Rock points out the obvious: find who was out on the balcony in that window, find the accomplice. Kaladin's stomach knots — Moash had been on the balcony in that window. He tells Sigzil he will ask around himself and not to speak of it. Then Sigzil holds a sphere to the wall and reveals what Kaladin had missed: the wood-and-bone debris was not cleared, it was *scraped away* by something massive. A chasmfiend passed close to the warcamps. They agree to move the recruits' training above ground for a while.

After dark Kaladin and Teft come back to find Bridge Four's barrack tense — men laughing too forced, bodies in combat stances. Renarin Kholin sits by the firepit in a fine uniform, rocking back and forth, staring at the ground. Kaladin draws him aside and Renarin asks plainly to enlist in Bridge Four. Kaladin protests every angle (Bridge Four guards his family; he is the son of the most powerful man in eastern Roshar; he should not be calling Kaladin *sir*). Pressed, Renarin tells him bluntly that he is epileptic — *blood weakness* is the folk word, but Kaladin already knows the term — myoclonic by what he describes, conscious through the seizures, with one-sided weakness in his arm for hours after; bitterleaf doing little. Renarin is surprised Kaladin knows the terms (*field medicine for epilepsy?*); Kaladin coughs and moves on. Renarin argues he is not asking for combat — Kaladin's men mostly patrol, so his fits will not endanger anyone — and reminds him that his father once made Adolin serve two months in a spearman squad so that an officer would have stood in his men's shoes. He will obey orders; when he is here he is not a prince's son, just another soldier. Coming to make this request, alone, terrified him — and he did it anyway. Kaladin sighs, hands him the dirty stew bowls to wash and orders him to help Rock scrub the cauldron after. Renarin lights up at the assignment with an enthusiasm Kaladin has never heard from anyone given washing duty.

Moash refuses to hand his own bowl over to a lighteyes — the bridgeman habit holds — then comes over to question the decision. *Bridge Four, our nightly conversations . . . these things are supposed to be safe from them.* Kaladin will speak to Dalinar in the morning to get permission; meanwhile Renarin's a good kid, and if any lighteyes could fit in here, he could. Moash thinks he is strange but accepts that keeping an eye on him and teaching him to defend himself is reason enough. Then Moash asks again what is to be done about Amaram; Kaladin growls that Amaram killed his friends in front of him and is his problem alone. *Your problem is our problem.* *I have some Voidbringers in my past too,* Moash admits — *maybe that's why I understand you* — and tells Kaladin the only honest answer is to bring Amaram into a duel and put him down man against man. Kaladin, with Syl signalling him to keep quiet, cannot make himself ask the question he wants to ask: *Moash, were you involved in a plot to kill the king?* Or: *what did the king do to your family?* Moash turns away, says not tonight. The men call him out drinking with Lopen and Drehy (who flips a chunk of stewed longroot into Lopen's face); Lopen calls himself ready, as ever, for anything at any time. Kaladin stammers an excuse about checking the other fires. He cannot live that life any longer; he would not know what to do with himself. Syl drifts back from dancing with a flamespren to ask him why he did not go, and he walks away to a bowl of stew.