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Adolin waits out a highstorm in a winehouse bunker cut into rock in the Outer Market, watching wine spin in his cup and listening to the storm. Tomorrow's parley with the Parshendi Shardbearer looms over him: a chance, after years of plateau attrition, of an actual peace. Two days after that he is due in the arena against Elit, who drifts past with a too-pleasant promise to take all of his family's Shards when he stomps him into the sand. The man is creepy in a small, calm way and then is gone, and Adolin is left alone with the rumble outside — though even in solid rock the storm undercuts any sense of safety, no matter how rational. He will be glad for the Weeping and a few weeks without highstorms.

Then a voice he should have spotted on the way in. Sadeas has been sitting behind him the whole time. The highprince strolls up in a stylish, open-cut brown coat with raw emeralds for buttons, a matching ring conspicuously on display — the gemhearts, Adolin realises with a sick lurch, won on a plateau run Sadeas and Ruthar took without Dalinar's sanction, racing the assigned highprince like the old days. He asks Adolin's opinion on the cut of the coat, then on the kind of justice Dalinar is selling, then drops the actual news: he has set down the title of Highprince of Information, the very lever Dalinar had been preparing to let him pull, and the other highprinces have privately agreed amongst themselves that none of them will accept such appointments either. He has openly stopped pretending to answer to the king. Adolin's hand twitches toward his Blade of its own accord; he forces it down — to cut Sadeas down here would unmake the very codes his father is trying to build. Sadeas leans close, calls him son, and says he is glad Adolin survived the Tower because, after the civil war he is now openly planning, the two of them will need each other inside of ten years. Adolin tells him exactly where he intends to put his Blade by then. Sadeas toasts and goes; the short bridgeman with silver at his temples gives Adolin a small nod of respect from the wall, and Adolin slumps back in the chair, drained, and waits until the rain has stopped entirely before he leaves — he never has liked how his uniform looks in the wet.

He walks back through the empty market with his two bridgemen, who he resents needing more than he minds personally. Hands in his pockets, he picks his way around puddles past ornamental shalebark only a few inches up the path. He thinks about Shallan — exotic and witty and smarter than him, and somehow not making him feel stupid about it — and tries to push Sadeas out of his head. He stops at jewelry shops looking for something for her and wonders, half seriously, whether the king's seat has now permanently shifted to this hard plain.

It is dark by the time he reaches his father's complex, and he is detouring for a kitchen snack when he sees too many men gathered at the wing where the Kholins keep their quarters: eight of Kaladin's bridgemen instead of the usual two, including a parshman in a guardsman's uniform with a spear on his shoulder. He shoves through and finds them ringed around fresh marks gouged into the sitting-room floor — numbers, and beneath them three words. A short Azish bridgeman reads them aloud — thirty-two days, with an instruction beneath them about going to the centre. Adolin posts guards at both ends of the corridor, sends for his aunt, and shuts the door on them all.

Inside, three of them. Navani kneels over the marks and confirms they were cut with a knife. Dalinar holds up the knife — his own side-knife, blunted, with stone dust in the gouges, found just outside the door of the study where he sat out the storm alone. Adolin gropes for any other explanation — a thief in the chambers, someone slipping in while his father was lost in the vision — and gets a quiet refusal from both of them. Navani tells him gently to stop reaching for a more comfortable answer. Dalinar cut them himself in the storm with no memory of the act. He stands with his back to the marks, looking east, and what unsettles Adolin is less the foretelling — though he names it that, a thing of the Voidbringers — than the picture of his father on his knees in a trance scratching warnings into the stone. Dalinar himself seems steadier than he has in weeks, immovable, and Adolin clings to that.

They run the date. Navani counts thirty-two days forward and the count lands in the middle of the Weeping, two days short of the year's end, where no highstorm is possible. They turn to "the centre" — the deep, never-scouted middle of the Plains, where the Parshendi must be entrenched somewhere too fixed to move, lacking Soulcasters to feed a march. Dalinar orders the marks filled with crem and a rug pulled over the spot, the bridgemen swept back in and sworn to secrecy. Tomorrow's parley remains the better hope, he reminds Adolin. Then, almost as an afterthought, he confirms that yes, there has always been a parshman among Kaladin's bridgemen, and yes, he gave Kaladin permission to put a spear in his hand. Out of curiosity.