POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin watches the army cross one of Dalinar's great chull-pulled mechanical bridges and tries to breathe in Stormlight from a firemark. Nothing answers. He cannot feel the Light inside the sphere at all. Syl drifts overhead with a knot of windspren, giggling. He calls her down; she returns, the Light returns with her, and as he gulps it he asks if their bond has weakened. She lands on his wrist, peers at his sphere like a curious child, and tells him brightly that he is being naughty — choosing badly. So this is because of his promise to Moash about the king — and Syl's simple spren morality, he tells himself, which cannot see that to be human is to choose between distasteful options. He snaps that he is no storybook hero of old, only a broken man. She tells him brightly that broken is what they all were, and zips away.
Across the chasm, the Kholin army flows on. Bridge Four hauls its own bridge in old padded vests over new uniforms; Rock argues, drinking, that the bridge is light not from training but from the defeat of Sadeas. On the target plateau a watch-post sits on a stone column, a wood platform the vaulters break down and crouch under during highstorms. The vaulter there tells Dalinar he has seen a glowing man flying back and forth above the Plains at night. Dalinar believes him — it is the Assassin in White, waiting — and wonders why he stays out here instead of striking. Dalinar thinks aloud that he may have to leave Kaladin back with the king next time, a sentence that lands in Kaladin like a stone: fate itself shoving him into position to betray Elhokar. They speak briefly of Renarin — refusing Zahel, hasn't summoned his Blade in weeks, but the men of Bridge Four like him.
Marching on, Kaladin fails to draw Stormlight again and finds Syl crouched watching a cremling. He sits beside her. *You don't like Moash's plan.* She tells him she does not want to force him to anything; he has to decide what he wants. He offers to break his word to Moash — she answers that he has given his word to Dalinar too, and that simply pulling out of the conspiracy now will not work. They have gone too far. He must speak the next Words. He does not know them. *Find them. Find them soon.* He whispers after her not to lose herself; he needs her.
Adolin trots up on his white-hooved horse in full blue Plate and teases him for walking. They talk a little of women — Adolin knows how to get them, not how to keep them, and would very much like to keep Shallan — then plan, badly, against the assassin: a screen of three hundred archers; Adolin and Kaladin together, the arena trick again, distract and kill. Kaladin warns Adolin to strike for spine or head: he saw the man heal a cut in the fall together. Adolin tries to nudge Kaladin into telling him what *that thing with the stuff* is — and fishes so badly that Kaladin, for the first time in days, almost laughs.
Shallan stops the bridge mid-unfolding to sketch its mechanism, the engineers and carpenters waiting on her, then gasps and sprints to a patch of moss growing in a strange pattern on a knot of stones. *Slay this moss for me*, she tells Adolin. He summons his Blade and shears the top off the pile. The cross-section is normal cremstone outside — and quarried white stone inside. Something built once stood here, long enough ago for centuries of highstorm crem to bury it. Kaladin sees it. So does Shallan.
Then Moash crosses to him in his repainted blue-and-red Plate (eyes already paling to tan, Blade strapped at his back in a sheath one more day from bonding) and kneels, saluting. The new plan, he whispers: no risk to anyone. Graves is an excellent shot; he will take the king with a bow. Kaladin only has to lead him to the spot. *We will not move while Dalinar is in the camp*, Kaladin says — *I won't have him hurt.* Moash agrees, claps his shoulder, and clinks away. An arrow. It feels cowardly. It needs to be done. Kaladin catches himself, too, listing Dalinar's sins to make the betrayal easier — wasn't Roshone one of them, only shipped off where he could not "do any more harm"?
Shallan and Kaladin needle each other across the moss — she accuses him of taking advantage of Adolin's good will; he says he calls a duke obnoxious because the duke calls him *bridgeboy*; she retorts that Adolin is the most difficult man on the Plains and gestures at him cheerfully letting a water boy try on his helm. Kaladin flushes and hikes off to take his own turn under the bridge with Bridge Four. The weight on his shoulders is genuinely lighter than it used to be.
They cross plateau after plateau, Kaladin's men running their old bridge ahead of Dalinar's mechanicals, the vanguard fanning forward each time. Sweaty, muscle-straining, good. He notices, in passing, a stout capped carpenter with a birthmark on his forehead working on the largest of Dalinar's bridges and cannot place him. He proposes to Dalinar that on the real assault Bridge Four should carry the assault bridges in a proper armored formation, and they discuss it. Then the carpenter calls Dalinar back across the just-set bridge — and at that moment Kaladin places him. Sadeas's lumberyard. He breaks into a run. Horns sound the alarm. Adolin spins to look for the danger. The carpenter throws the emergency latch. Kaladin sees Dalinar turn toward the horns, sees Adolin in his Plate sprinting to him, sees Shallan still in the centre of the bridge — and the bridge lurches and falls.