POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin walks out along the bridges after dark, spheres at his belt, returning to the spot where the King's Wit once met him. He waits until no one is watching and steps off into the chasm. Below, in the wet shadow of stacked greatshell bones, he begins to practise — running, throwing himself at the wall, Lashing himself sideways and falling badly. Syl follows as a ribbon of light, then settles cross-armed on his chest after one particularly miserable landing. The trick, he discovers, is not the landing or the reflexes; it is the moment of panic when down stops being down. Treat the wall as a floor, treat the air as a current. He goes from staggering to running. He vaults from wall to ceiling without thinking.
Meanwhile, in Sadeas's warcamp — full of unbuttoned uniforms, traditional slaves with brand scars, fewer parshmen than Sebarial's — Shallan crosses the streets in the face of a messenger boy. She holds the costume with Stormlight and a sketch she drew that morning. A patrol sergeant turns her back for skipping a new perimeter post; the sergeant's name, she learns, is Hav. She reaches Amaram's manor — small, temporary, still walled mostly by striped posts — and ducks behind an outbuilding. A young darkeyed maid steps out arm in arm with one of her two evening sweethearts and skips off into the night. Shallan breathes in Stormlight and steps out wearing the maid's face.
She makes the kitchen, where the cook is too sharp and orders the maid to polish mirrors instead of running upstairs. Shallan obeys, ducks for the front stair, and walks straight into Amaram himself — who was supposed to be dining with Dalinar and the king. He has stopped at the door of the locked room she has come to see and is fitting a key into the lock. She invents a message from the perimeter on the fly and learns, in the process, that the maid's name is Telesh and that Amaram takes a personal interest in her romantic indecision. Amaram leaves to find Hav. Shallan counts to ten, calls Pattern out of her skirts, and lets him reshape himself into the keyhole; the lock clicks.
The room is filled with maps and walls of script in a glyph-phonetic shorthand she has only heard described — the stormwarden's trick of underlined glyphs strung together for sound to get around the male prohibition on writing. The maps of the Plains are more extensive than the Prime Map in the king's gallery; the notes refer to the Parshendi, to the place of the centre, to Jasnah's work on the Voidbringers. The paragon of public Alethi honor, in private, is working to engineer the return of the Voidbringers. She has no time to read it all; she takes Memories, sketches a decoy of him for Mraize, and slips out.
She closes the door and walks back down the stairs in Amaram's own shape, scratching her face to mask her lips while Pattern speaks aloud in his voice. The cook, frightened, accepts the order to forget what she has seen. Shallan dispels the illusion outside, slips into the boy's face again, and is sitting on the front steps when Amaram and Hav return. She offers him a manufactured errand from Brightness Shallan Davar — a sketch of his Blade for an updated Shardblade ledger. He agrees. Then, almost to himself, he summons the Blade and holds it up in the spill of light from the manor's front door, talking about how beautiful these terrible weapons are.
Shallan knows the Blade. The wave-ridged back edge, the etchings, the curve of it — her brother Helaran carried it. She presses Amaram for the story. He retells the version he gave Dalinar long ago: he took it off a young red-haired Veden assassin, forced to drive the Blade through his visor. He does not know it, but she is staring at her brother's killer. She manages a thank-you, walks until she is out of his guards' sight, and lets a child's tears escape.
Above the Plains, Kaladin has stopped fearing. He vaults out of the chasms in a sheet of windspren, flies east over plateau and pit, hangs suspended between an up-Lashing and a down-Lashing high above the camps and sees, for a moment, the Plains as a pattern he half remembers from a dream. He drifts back to a stone spire and the windspren explode away from him in a wave. Falling home, he and Syl argue about Shardblades. He tells her he cannot fight the assassin without one and intends to start Zahel's training. She tells him the Blades are evil because they are tokens of broken oaths. He asks whether a new Blade can be forged that is not. She says yes, then will not say how. He lands on a dark plateau, drifts down into the chasms, and on the long walk home almost turns north, toward Sadeas's camp and Amaram's bed, before Syl talks him back to Dalinar's.
In his barracks room he finds someone in the dark. Shen is waiting with the spear Kaladin gave him. He is leaving the camp tonight; he will not say why. On the way past, he stops at Kaladin's shoulder and gives him his real name — Rlain — and says quietly that no wind will be the worst of what he meets out there, and walks out the door.