(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Dalinar walks the warcamp staging-ground the morning after the season's last highstorm with Navani and Amaram in tow, supply wagons being loaded, spearmen counting off, the Weeping due in by midday tomorrow and the expedition with it. Amaram is asking him, again, to make a peace with Sadeas before he rides out — to make room, in the name of the Voidbringers that he says he can feel coming, for the two of them to work together. Dalinar will not. The road to unity is not the table; the road is east, across the Plains to the Parshendi camp and the closure his brother never got. Amaram tells him sharply that one cannot give a man authority and then second-guess his every breath; the line lands harder than Dalinar lets show. He asks after Bordin's story. Amaram says the man's story checks out, the madman is only raving about Shardblades — a horn cuts him off, a chrysalis sighting too far in to chase, Dalinar calls off the plateau run for the day — and a breathless runner arrives with the news that Stormblessed has come up out of the chasms.

He runs the whole way. The triage tent is packed with Bridge Four in cobalt blue, blocking the path; they part for him. Kaladin is sitting on the table with his leg wrapped, his uniform coat tied around something the size of a man's head with a vine. He pulls himself up onto a spear and salutes — the slowest salute Dalinar has ever taken — and explains that he fell face-first and has a hard head. Past him, Shallan is at the back of the tent with her own surgeons, hair and dress in ribbons. Kaladin presents her as one future daughter-in-law, delivered, sorry about the packaging. Then he cuts the vine off the bundle and tosses the chasmfiend gemheart onto the ground at Dalinar's boots, where it rolls glowing against the leather. Shallan calls across that they found the beast already dead and climbed its back out of the floodwater, and waited the storm out in a crack. Kaladin agrees with her, badly. Dalinar does not press the lie. Navani arrives, the mother axehound finally roused, and bundles Shallan off in a blanket toward bath, food, and bed. Kaladin tells him quietly that Shallan found something out there that he needs to hear before the march. Then, his own voice softer: Dalinar tells him his men kept their posts at the chasm head through everything, and asks what they know about him that he himself does not see. Kaladin looks at him a beat, then says he is just what is in front of Dalinar and not what Dalinar hopes for. Dalinar lets it stand — *this man is a hero, again*, he tells the surgeons — and goes to find out what the girl knows.

An hour later, in his sitting room, Shallan is wrapped in one of Navani's dresses, hair drying on her neck, smelling of perfume. Pattern sits on the table beside her replaying — in Navani's voice, then Dalinar's — the argument the two are having about whether Shallan can be taken on the expedition. Navani says no. Dalinar says he needs her: in four years no scout or cartographer has seen the pattern on the Plains, and she has. Pattern offers, helpfully, to reproduce the noises Dalinar and Navani made when they got close to one another, and is rebuffed. Shallan is thinking about the Oathgate — that only one of the Knights Radiant is said to have been able to open it, and she does not yet know if she counts. She asks Pattern whether she is a Radiant. He answers carefully: not yet. There is more to do. She presses — how can he not *know* — and he tells her that he was not himself when the Radiants existed. Spren do not die as men die; he was diffuse, in everything, not aware. There are no older Cryptics who knew the old bond, because the Recreance killed them — thousands of us, and many of several other spren peoples, broken to mindlessness when the knights broke their oaths. The Stormfather survived. Few else did. Shallan says, quietly, that this is why he keeps telling her she will kill him. *Inevitable*, Pattern says, *but the cost is worth the chance*. She asks if Words are what she still owes. He tells her she has already said the Words. What she lacks is truth — that her Lightweaving is truth and lie mixed, and she must come to understand both.

Adolin bursts through the door, white around the eyes, and grabs her. She had a clever line ready about the state of her hair; it goes unused. She wraps her arms around him, feels his back, and after a long moment turns the embrace into a forced kiss; he melts into it. He has spent the day delivering his father's join-the-expedition-or-be-shamed-for-it ultimatum to every other highprince in turn — his father's idea, to keep him out of his head about her. He tells her, fiercely, that she will not be hurt again; the man who threw the lever is dead, poisoned before they could question him, and certainly one of Sadeas's. The promise stiffens her. *Don't say things like that.* She tells him she will not be locked away again. He does not press. He weaves his fingers between hers, and she takes the gentleness as enough.

Dalinar and Navani step in. Dalinar has a difficult request. Shallan has one of her own, and gets there first: she needs to ride with the expedition, because she is sure the ruins of an ancient city lie on the Plains, and Jasnah was hunting for them. Dalinar smiles at the word *duty* and grants it before he has even heard the rest. His own request is for the full map of the Plains her scratch survey of the chasms made him believe she can deliver. Yes, she can — but she asks one thing in return: leave every parshman in the warcamp. She cannot fully say why, only that Jasnah held them dangerous, especially out on the Plains. Navani confirms it can be done, only the officers inconvenienced. Dalinar gives the order. They leave within the hour, without parshmen.