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Dalinar and Navani descend the switchbacks from the Pinnacle toward the feasting basin, in no hurry. Below, the armies of Bethab and Thanadal are filing back from a successful plateau run; a rider hurries the report up to the king and Dalinar sends one of his Bridge Four guards down to fetch the details for him. He thinks of the bridgemen — disciplined considering their origin, displeased with him for having jailed their captain, but the sort who will not let that fester. Navani, hair done with softly-glowing sapphires, talks fabrials — a pump that would lift water against gravity through gemstone-stoppered pipes — and a scholarly breakthrough out of Rushu: a fragment recovered through Kharbranth arguing that the bonding gemstones in modern Shardblades were not part of the original weapons but were added centuries after the Recreance to recover the lost ability to summon and dismiss them. Dalinar grunts; he is somewhere else entirely, running the numbers on the coming expedition — Soulcasters to hide, supplies, scribes, horses, the unknown of which highprinces, if any, will march with him.

Navani stops at the foot of the path. He has not given her a real conversation in days. She admits this is the first time anyone has tried to take a child of hers from her — she could not be a mother to Jasnah once Jasnah grew past needing one — and now they are working on her son. She asks who will protect Dalinar when the assassin returns; he has no real answer. She wonders aloud whether it would be easier if his unification of Alethkar simply failed. The storm comes either way, he reminds her, twelve days out. She asks how he managed grief when his wife died — a question that implies, finally, that things between her and Gavilar had not been easy. He cannot answer it for a stranger reason still: the Almighty, or what wore that name, has cut her out of him, and he can go weeks without noticing the patched-over hole.

On the king's island, where the genders mix and only the most powerful are invited, eyes follow him. The whispers are louder tonight, the smiles secret. Wit is already in his chair insulting all comers. Dalinar threads through to Vamah, who has been listening to him in recent dinners and may yet commit, and asks him about his light-cavalry tactics — only to lose him to a fresh round of snickering from the other end of the island. He crosses to find Sadeas and Aladar feeding themselves fruit; Sadeas only smiles and walks away, Aladar trailing in his wake, and Dalinar tells the latter's back that he never figured him for a pup at a master's heels.

Then Wit hails Brightlord Amaram across the water and proceeds to flay him in front of the assembled lighteyes — wondering aloud what he uses to keep his hands looking clean, suggesting a hammer to the head, lining up the word *imbecile* and concluding he hasn't the time to define it. Dalinar hauls Amaram aside; Wit gets in one last salute behind them. Amaram hands over a sheaf of papers — copies of Navani's transcripts of Dalinar's visions, being passed around the feast. Amaram declares them obvious revelation from the Almighty and his confidence in Dalinar as the Almighty's prophet; he is still investigating the supposed Herald. Navani strides over with the original journal, swats Wit in the face with it as she passes, and hisses to Dalinar that they have not only stolen and copied — they have changed her words and added mocking commentary in another woman's hand, all to make him look ridiculous.

Dalinar climbs onto a serving table, hand on a lantern pole, and quiets the island simply by being where no one of his rank should ever be. Confirms publicly that the leaked transcripts are real. The visions are real. The commentary was added; the tone was altered; but he has them in nearly every storm, and from this night on each one will be published in full so the scholars of the world can study them. He picks out Sadeas in the crowd. He invites every person present to come laugh in his face if they must laugh at all. Then he steps down and goes to work, drumming up support for the expedition conversation by conversation across the islands — refusing to reference the leaked pages himself except when asked, presenting Alethkar with the unforced confidence of a soldier-king rather than the doddering visionary the doctored transcript would have made of him.

Hours later the islands are mostly empty. The river's spheres have been changed from violet to blue for the second moon. The king's coach has rolled away with Navani in it; Adolin has gone to escort Shallan back to Sebarial's camp. Dalinar sits down at last, exhaustionspren swirling around him. Wit walks up in a master-servant's borrowed coat. He praises the table speech — Dalinar took an attempted humiliation and turned it into a promise — and then quietly notes that no one was speaking to the king tonight. They came to Dalinar. Because he is, essentially, king.

Dalinar asks: *am I a tyrant?* Wit, for once without a joke, tells him gently that he is — that he reaches for power and does not loose it easily — and that benevolent tyranny is the lesser evil in a moment that cannot afford weak rule. In another time and place he would denounce Dalinar with spit and bile. Here, today, he praises him as what this world needs. Dalinar does not accept it. He, Gavilar and Sadeas were wrong to take the throne by force; what they screamed by doing so — strength is the right of rule — is exactly what Sadeas now turns back on him. Nohadon was teaching something more, and Dalinar has been missing it.

Then Wit tells him he is leaving — he must be somewhere, though even he is not entirely sure why. Dalinar asks if he is one of them, a Herald. Wit laughs and says no. A Radiant? No. He is but a man, much as he sometimes wishes he were not; their goals do not align completely, and if it comes to it he will, with tears, let this world burn for what he needs. He must go because if his enemy finds him his selfhood would be torn apart beyond reconstitution. Dalinar asks who. The one Dalinar himself fights, Wit answers — naming him father of hatred — salutes, and jogs off.