(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Kaladin takes the morning escort of Adolin himself rather than hand a foreign would-be bride to anyone else on the watch. He still does not trust Shallan Davar — a foreign woman, a secret betrothal, the only person who could vouch for her dead — so today he is one man, sour and short-handed, while Teft runs the new recruits on patrol and the rest of Bridge Four guards the king. The two trade the same low-grade barbs they always do on the way out into the warcamp under a grey overcast sky that reminds Kaladin of the Weeping and puts him in a mood he cannot shake.

The carriage driver turns out to be Wit, back in the camps without yet announcing himself to the king and entertaining himself in the meantime. He needles Kaladin about the flute left behind in Sadeas's camp, talks circles about deafness and tonic chords, asks what Kaladin traded his sense of humour for, and tells him he wants only one thing from him — a story. Be dynamic, says Wit. Don't be dull. They roll through Sebarial's warcamp — the only one in the Plains that looks like a city, with tenements, markets, and farmers carrying lavis reeds and buckets of crem out to fields on the southwest hills — and pull up at a manor finer than the citylord's house back in Hearthstone.

Shallan bounces down the steps, blue eyes already on Adolin — then sees the driver, lets out a small cry of "You!", and throws herself across the carriageway to embrace Wit in front of her betrothed. She whispers a thank-you for something neither Kaladin nor Adolin understand; Wit for once does not know what to do with his hands. Adolin is more rattled by the hug than by the cousins he is about to spend the morning with. Wit swears Shallan is far too young for him and tells Adolin to stick to women his own age — of which there is, he claims, exactly one near these parts and she and he never did get along.

Inside the carriage Kaladin squeezes in next to Adolin as silent chaperone, much to the prince's annoyance, and tries to decide whether Shallan is an opportunistic fortune-hunter or an opportunistic assassin. Her flirting is so blatant it nearly cures him of the worry. Shallan talks Adolin past a winehouse into a stop at a traveling menagerie in the Outer Market — she clearly has an ulterior reason, but it is at least not a knife — and then pulls a sheaf of papers from her satchel. She has been at Jasnah's biography of the old king and found her chapter's spectacular win.

Eighteen years ago, she tells them, the powerful Highprince Yenev was brought down not in battle but in a duel. At a tournament during Gavilar's unification campaign, Sadeas put on a deliberately spectacular preliminary bout, claimed the ancient King's Boon from the throne when the crowd was hot for him, and asked for Yenev's heart on the end of his sword. He killed the man and made an opening for Aladar to take that princedom. The same machinery — the Right of Challenge — could now be used against Sadeas himself. Adolin only has to win his next duel so spectacularly that the king has to grant him the boon. Kaladin objects that Sadeas can simply send a champion in his place; Adolin agrees, but says the political damage of losing his champion will be near total. "It's just a game," Kaladin argues. "Yes," Adolin answers — but a game Sadeas has accepted, with rules he himself has used. Kaladin sits back, struck. This tradition may be the answer he has been looking for.

They reach the Outer Market and find Wit gone from the driver's seat, replaced midway by a hired lad in brown trousers. The boy hops down sheepishly to explain the swap. Adolin dismisses it as a thing Wit does. They walk into the menagerie under the patter of its Azish proprietor — rows of stormwagons, exotic beasts brought from across the world. Shallan is enraptured by an ugly, warm-blooded, tentacled lump labelled "devil rock from Marabethia" — a young sarpenthyn, she identifies it, the family of which is barely known in Jah Keved — and pokes a finger through the bars to make it inflate. She sketches it, then a small chull-like crab, then a chicken with red, blue, and green plumage she once missed her chance to draw, while Adolin cracks jokes that mostly fail and Kaladin watches the crowd. Syl lands on his shoulder and asks if a safe life in a cage would suit him. It would not. He admits, softly, that he misses the wind, and that he is almost ready.

The biggest crowd is around a reinforced cage at the back, drawing even fearspren up out of the stone. A whitespine lies inside, dormant under wet rags meant to keep it from going to crystal; Kaladin remembers a young man dead on a surgery table and feels nothing he can use. Then Dalinar arrives at the menagerie with his own guards — and Amaram at his shoulder, wearing a yellow-gold cloak with the double eye of the Almighty on the back. The menagerie owner asks the question half the camps are already whispering. Dalinar sighs, then says the words aloud: under the king's direction, he has refounded the Knights Radiant. The ancient oaths have been spoken again. Amaram, at his request, was the first to speak them, and stands at their head.