POV: dalinar
Summary
Kaladin cannot sleep. *You have killed her.* The words the Stormfather gave him in the eye of the storm will not quiet. His leg throbs; the barrack feels too still with Bridge Four already marshalling. He props himself up on a spear and hobbles into the milk-grey sunlight to watch the army leave. Lopen gets under his bad arm, suggests, very seriously, that the fix to a sulking spren is a small hat. Kaladin tries again to draw Stormlight from a sphere in his fist. Nothing. He admits to Lopen that he has lost Syl. They walk through the empty warcamp to the parade terrace above the Plains and Kaladin gives his boyhood self a moment of the spectacle he had always imagined: thousands of Alethi spearmen in blocks, archers and cavalry, scribes, drummers, the Soulcasters hidden behind walls of cloth.
On the staging-plateau itself, Dalinar is greeted by a wholly unexpected addition: Sebarial is marching too. The man climbs out of his carriage — his mistress Palona inside in a hat — to admit, cheerfully, that he came because he can feel something is going to happen out on the Plains and he wants his hand near the prize when it does. Roion hangs at Dalinar's side wringing his hands; Amaram in his Radiant cloak is grumbling that Sebarial's trust comes cheap. Then a second banner crosses the warcamps' northern line. Aladar — one of Sadeas's loudest voices in council — has come too. Dalinar rides hard to him alone. He demands the promise from Aladar's own mouth that this is not another betrayal. Aladar gives it, more honestly than Dalinar expects: he has been arguing against Dalinar in council, he says, to convince himself; he has been afraid Dalinar was right all along, and he is done being one of Sadeas's slaves. Dalinar takes the hand. The condition for joining is the same one he put to Sebarial and Roion — leave the parshmen behind. Four armies will go.
West of the warcamps Sadeas and Ialai are out on horseback, ostensibly to inspect Sebarial's new farming. She floats a coup — seize the Pinnacle, take the king, end the line — while Dalinar is gone. He turns it down. He expects Dalinar to die on the Plains without his help; in passing he tells her that, had he known Dalinar would actually march, they would not even have needed her assassin. *Her* assassin, she thinks privately, with a regret of professional pride: the plan was clean; these things are simply not certain. A courier reaches them with a letter that darkens her mood. Later Sadeas lifts a spyglass and sees Aladar's colours alongside Dalinar's on the muster. He sits very still a long while, quells his annoyance, and tells Ialai to draft a list of suitable replacements for the highprinces who, in his expectation, are about to die for him.
Back on the muster, Dalinar notices a tall man in blue sitting on a stone among the Bridge Four bodyguard, and tells Amaram to come with him so the public rumours can be put to rest. Kaladin forces himself to his feet on the bad leg to salute, Lopen under one arm, Teft under the other. Teft tells him their best man — Moash — has been left behind with a team of his own choice to guard the king. The chill of it crosses Kaladin's face and is missed by Dalinar, who turns to Amaram and asks him, in front of Kaladin and the whole knot of Bridge Four, whether he had truly never set eyes on this man before the Plains. *Yes*, Amaram says. *And his claim that you took your Plate and Blade from him?* Amaram takes Dalinar by the arm and dismisses the boy as attention-starved.
Dalinar tells him an apology is owed. Kaladin begins one — *not you, son* — and the air changes. Dalinar lays the sting out: Bordin sent to drink with Amaram's personal guard and let slip a buried treasure outside the warcamp, the madman's Blade placed in a nearby cave, Dalinar giving Amaram every chance to come clean. When Amaram reported finding nothing — and in fact had removed the cache — Dalinar knew. Amaram pales and reaches for the hilt that should be there. White mist coalesces in Dalinar's hand first: a wide, cleaverlike Shardblade he has been bonding all that week he claimed illness. The point goes to Amaram's throat a beat before Amaram's own Blade forms in his hand.
*Why*, Dalinar asks, knuckles white on the hilt. Amaram confesses without flinching. He killed Kaladin's squad, took the Blade, and would do it again. The world will need practised, accomplished Shardbearers when the Voidbringers return; a few darkeyes' lives are the cheap price of that armament. He looks Kaladin in the eye and says he is sorry. He means it. He believes the calculus. Kaladin understands that the man honestly thinks himself just. *And what is it, Dalinar*, Amaram says, *when you send thousands of men to their deaths for gemhearts*. Dalinar does not answer. *Take off that cloak*, he tells him. *You are no Radiant.* Amaram drops the cloak on the rock and walks away with his personal guard of fifty falling in behind him. Dalinar will not pursue him — a Shardbearer cannot be jailed and will not be murdered for a trial. He will be tried, fairly, when Dalinar returns. Kaladin sags between Lopen and Teft, drained, and thanks Dalinar for believing him. Dalinar dismisses his strange new Blade — strange because, somehow, it feels *wrong* in his hand — and goes back to the march. He tells himself it is only that he misses his old Blade.