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Under a darkening sky Kaladin makes evening rounds of the Kholin bridge crews. Pitt's Bridge Seventeen stands to attention in clean uniforms, sloppy in maneuvers but earnest; he praises them anyway with the practiced lies a commander learns, makes a private note to fold them into Teft's rotation, and leaves them to their nightly bean curry. Bridge Eighteen is the problem he expected: Sergeant Vet pleads where he should order, and his discordant men have already splintered into small cliques eating in isolated bunches. They rise sluggishly, and Kaladin sees the dull truth in their eyes — nothing he could do to them would be worse than what they already survived as bridgemen. He lectures them on unity, plans another chasm session, and admits he may have to break them up. Syl zips past him as a ribbon of light to scold him for working through dinner. He skips the last two crews and walks back toward Bridge Four, where he can hear Rock's laughter rolling between the barracks.

At the cookpot Hobber ladles stew from a tall stump the crew built for him, a blanket across his grey legs, while Renarin kneels quietly at the washbasin in bridgeman uniform, as he does every night. Bridge Four is suddenly richer by three thick-armed Herdazians on a log — Lopen has folded in his cousins Punio, Rod, and Huio, and protests that "too many cousins" is impossible. In the storeroom, lit by a single diamond chip, Kaladin finds Shen stacking tallew. He barks the parshman to attention, then offers him his own spear: he has spoken to Dalinar Kholin and told him plainly that he trusts Shen. Bridge Four does not own slaves; he apologises for having been afraid; Leyten and Natam will train him aside from the new recruits. Shen takes the spear with reverence and starts to say something, then trades it for "later" when Moash's voice calls from outside. Moash is hauling the crew out for a tavern night, and the men cheer to see their commander dragged along — they want him human, not lighteyed.

The walk to the market passes barracks where ordinary soldiers sharpen spears and oil breastplates, then a strip of torchlit shops where a crier sells spanreed news of war in Jah Keved and a new emperor in Azir. Rock and Sigzil buy fried chouta — Soulcast flangria balls with deep-fried cremling claws crunching in Rock's. Moash vetoes the tavern argument: the Ornery Chull tonight. Inside, packed shoulder-to-shoulder under firelight, Peet threads to the bar where the darkeyed barmaid Ka brightens to see him and finds them a table along the wall. Sigzil raises the question of married men in Bridge Four — watching Peet lean across the bar makes it plain — and Kaladin realises he will need partitioned barracks or market lodgings, and that they should test whether Ka can read so the battalion finally has a scribe.

Over ale, Moash mocks Rock's claim that the Horneater Peaks are warm, and Sigzil flatly states the facts: each peak is a crater holding a warm lake that makes life possible despite altitude. Rock insists facts are stories told wrong and unspools the Unkalaki origin tale: long ago the Unkalaki were hated and nearly destroyed by lowlanders; the tana'kai went to the gods of the trees for hiding, then the gods of the waters for breath, and was refused both because men hunt trees and fish too; only the gods of the mountains agreed, on condition the Unkalaki bring up water and fruit and warmth themselves, which the tana'kai begged from the other gods and so earned the peaks. He calls the lakes waters of life, a connection to the place of the gods; an Unkalaki swimming in them may commune with gods. He admits he has met one — Lunu'anaki, god of travel and mischief — who rose from the depths and on shore mocked Rock's beard and the Horneater calendar. Rock describes him as person-shaped, paler than Alethi, angular and handsome, with white-not-grey hair though young. Sigzil looks up sharply at "white hair," sets his drink aside, and pleads tiredness; Kaladin presses Rock on whether the waters are why he can see spren, and is told only that it is involved and the story will not be told further. The talk drifts to Sadeas and Highprince Ruthar running plateaux they were not assigned, throwing one gemheart aside as if it meant nothing, and to Sadeas's loud outrage that he cannot plant "inspectors" inside Dalinar's camp. Kaladin swirls his ale and lets himself picture climbing a wall like the Assassin, glowing and quiet in the night, to put Sadeas down the way he had wished he could put Amaram down. Something is wrong with that reasoning; he cannot quite name it.

After an hour Moash nudges him: the meeting he had agreed to is waiting in a back room. A swarthy guard with long knives at his belt lounges by the door; Syl is suddenly vanished even from his sight, voice in his ear, telling him to be careful. Inside, three men and one woman drink wine, and a second cloaked guard waits at the back wall. Graves — Alethi, roughly Adolin's age, jet hair styled crisp, an open jacket over a black shirt embroidered with white vines and a stock at his throat — stands and pumps Kaladin's hand as a celebrity for embarrassing Sadeas and saving the Blackthorn. The mercenary Rill sits in heavy leathers with an axe by his chair. The clerk Danlan — recognised as one of Dalinar's — sips her wine through buttoned sleeve and watches. Graves drops the heartiness when Kaladin cuts him off, and lays out the case for killing King Elhokar: spoiled, petulant, paranoid, destroying the kingdom; Danlan adds detail from three years in Kholinar cleaning up codes Elhokar would have signed into law without Dalinar to restrain him; Rill calls a king's removal a citizen's right and duty. They had wanted an accident; Graves now decides he will do the deed himself and asks Kaladin — commander of the King's Guard — only for an opening at which no other guard need bleed. Danlan says Elhokar is dying slow on the throne already; better quick. Kaladin threatens to turn them in; Graves asks unconcerned what a surgeon does with a hand that festers. Kaladin says he will consider, and walks out.

Back in the common-room noise Moash presses him — Graves is a Shardbearer who married a darkeyed woman, fathered a one-eyed son among others, and treats all men the same regardless of eye colour. Kaladin tells him he said he would consider only to get out of the room, calls them traitors, and forbids Moash to speak of it again or meet with them. He drops back into his seat. Rock and Lopen laugh around him; Rock is on his sixth or seventh ale and unaffected, Lopen is tipsy at three, Sigzil still on his second. Kaladin cannot rejoin the conversation. "Be the surgeon this kingdom needs" rings under the singing, and he cannot quite produce the answer he needs to throw at it.