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Adolin dresses the next morning with his hair still damp from a bath and two decisions made: he will stop worrying about his father's behaviour during the visions — the package of vision, mandate, and looming disaster has to be believed as a whole or not at all — and he will pre-empt the second discussion before Dalinar can have it.

He walks into the Kholin sitting room to find his father already at the parley map with Navani, General Khal, Brightness Teshav, and Captain Kaladin; Renarin is at the door in a Bridge Four uniform he still refuses to take off. Dalinar is rehearsing logistics: bridge crews on standby for retreat, a scouting pass on the meeting plateau, a position for himself behind it all. Adolin steps in and tells his father he will not be there. They argue across the table — Adolin cites the assassin still loose, the timing of his last appearance after the Parshendi messenger came in, the simple arithmetic that everyone in the room is worth less to the kingdom than Dalinar himself. Dalinar hates that it is true; Kaladin agrees with Adolin aloud; the Blackthorn, who almost never loses a contest of will, yields. Adolin adds that he needs to borrow Renarin's Plate.

The strangest part of riding out is not wearing Dalinar's old Plate — armour adapts and feels like his own within minutes — and not leading the column under his father's banner, which he has done for six weeks now. It is riding Gallant in place of Sureblood. Only Dalinar has ever sat in that saddle; it takes an unrushed explanation from Dalinar just to be allowed to hold the reins. Adolin knows he could never ride the Ryshadium into a real fight — the horse would dump him and gallop home — and he is unexpectedly melancholy to be out without his own mount. The meeting plateau sits much further south than scouts normally push. Its centre is dominated by an oddly shaped mound: an entire chasmfiend crusted with crem until the stone became a corpse, ridged and faced and watching. Eerie. Adolin turns away from it.

The Parshendi come — two hundred of them, leaping the chasm to the meeting plateau. He calls for his scribe; Brightness Inadara is carried up on a palanquin and then walks the rest of the way at his side, board and spanreed in hand. Their leader — silver-helmed, faceplate down — strides out alone to meet him on a span of bare rock with the fossilized chasmfiend on their left. She names herself: Eshonai. She asks if he remembers her, and he keeps his own helm down and pitches his voice low and lies that he does not. Her own voice has a rhythm to it, less song than chant; he had expected singing and it is not that.

He opens, as his father had coached, by speaking of Parshendi surrender, and she laughs and tells him that is not the point at all. She has come to tell him that things have changed. Adolin stalls, giving Inadara time to send to the warcamp; she whispers him Dalinar's and Navani's replies. He offers a truce. Eshonai tells him her people are not as weak as the Alethi have believed. He asks what she wants. She says peace will come when one side is dead. She turns to go. He breaks form, calls after her, asks why. She comes back, and gives him the answer to a different question — the only one that has ever really mattered. King Gavilar, she says, was a fool to tell her people anything on the night they signed his treaty. He boasted to them; he expected them to be glad of what he was bringing back. She shakes her head and jogs off, Plate clinking.

Adolin stands on the empty rock feeling like he has lost something his father could have held onto. Dalinar's reply comes through the spanreed a moment later: come home, her mind was made up before she crossed the chasm.

Back in the warcamp he stomps into a room already past mourning the talks. Dalinar stands over a table strewn with maps and troop arrows, Navani and Khal and Teshav and the army's four battalionlords around him, Teleb silent at the wall in Adolin's won Plate, parshman servants pouring wine. Adolin pulls off the helm and apologises for not letting Dalinar go himself — perhaps his father could have salvaged it. Dalinar tells him no: these are the people who killed his brother on the night of the treaty, and they have not changed. The fact that they will not deal is the only fact Dalinar now needs. His conscience is clear.

The arrows on the map all point east. Dalinar explains: the whole army, with as many highprinces as will follow him, Soulcasters in tow for food, marching out across the Plains to find the Parshendi centre and end the war before whatever they are racing toward can be finished. Navani picks the day — the lull after the last highstorm before the Weeping, weeks of rain and no storms while they are exposed on open rock. Adolin's spine crawls: the date falls within days of the countdown scratched on his father's floor. Dalinar looks up at him and gives him his job. Duel high, duel often, win more Shards. Target the Shardbearers loyal to Sadeas and beat them publicly enough that the camps cannot look away; Dalinar will work the neutral highprinces on the Vengeance Pact and on the codes he keeps insisting are the path to Alethi greatness. Adolin already has Elit tomorrow; he says he has a target for after that.