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Shallan climbs into the wind on the eighth day of the inward march, stormcoat pulled close, Gaz and Vathah muttering up the slope behind her. The Weeping is supposed to be a placid stretch of contemplation between highstorms, but the wind here at the heart of the Shattered Plains is doing something it should not, and the rocks are slicker than the maps suggested. She crests the bulbous, leeward-rounded rise the scouts pointed her to and looks out — past her own fogged spyglass — at the inner plateaus, the country no Alethi has walked. In the rain-veil, the silhouette resolves into what she came for: building-shapes mounded under centuries of crem, dribbled in layers like wax on a child's block. A city. The shape they have been chasing through Jasnah's notebooks. Even the formation she is standing on, she realises, must once have been a building.

Bridge Four men come up after her, soaked. Dalinar has pulled the vanguard back and ordered a defensive perimeter; he sends word that if she will not come, Adolin is authorised to carry her back over a Shardplated shoulder. She finds the line romantic and obeys.

In one of six identical tents at the centre of camp she walks into the highprinces' council. Aladar favours staying on the current plateau and forcing the enemy to assault them. Roion points out that the Parshendi need only stand across the chasm and wait — the Weeping is finite, and the army will have to retreat before highstorms resume. Sebarial eats fruit beside Palona and turns Roion's caution into a backhanded compliment. Shallan cuts in: she refuses to let them bivouac, and the council should take Roion's argument as a reason to press inward. Dalinar reminds her she does not set tactics — but Adolin tramps in then in dripping Shardplate to report at least ten thousand of the red-eyed Parshendi now massed on the three plateaus around them. Navani, scribing from a chair, quietly relays what Rlain has told her: only their soldiers can leap chasms, and the new form likely as well. The enemy will not flee on the open rock of the stormlands; they will fight here.

Dalinar decides. They march inward in the morning, threaten the city, and force the engagement. The retreat across days of plateaus is no longer an option; it was given up days ago.

Alone with him afterward — Navani tucked into the crook of his arm — Dalinar asks Shallan again how real her portal is. She gives him Jasnah's certainty. He tells her plainly what he did not say in front of the council: he agreed to push forward in part because of her exploration, and tomorrow is the last day of the countdown scribbled on his walls. Whatever they meet, they meet it tomorrow, and she is the backup plan. If the evil overwhelms them, her pathway through the Oathgate may be the only retreat the armies — and Alethkar itself — will have.

Days pass and the rain does not stop, and in the all-but-deserted warcamps Kaladin refuses to let it win. He limps a daily circuit on a crutch Lopen has rigged with a tied-on umbrella, splashing through puddles in the boots Shallan stole from him. There are no highstorms; the spheres are starting to fail; even the rainspren, blue and one-eyed, irritate him. The Weeping keeps pushing Tien up under his ribs — laughter against the gloom, and then the squadleader who set the untrained brother at the front as a sacrifice to slow the enemy. He squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself he has survived loss before; he will survive this. He thinks of Rock, Teft, Dalinar, Adolin, Shallan, everyone out there on the Plains without him, and admits to himself that for weeks he had been about to show Dalinar what he could do, and never quite would have. Maybe Shallan will be the Radiant he failed to be.

He rounds back to the Bridge Four barrack and finds a fine carriage in the king's livery in front of it. Inside, Elhokar is half-drunk, Moash guarding the door in Shardplate. The king is sharp-cheeked and unhappy and complains that this small room is all Dalinar thinks an officer deserves. Then, with Moash and the other guard sent out and the spheres in the corner already going dim, Elhokar asks Kaladin the question he came to ask. *How did you know how to be a hero?* He sees the pattern in everyone else and not in himself; whatever he tries goes wrong; his father could rule even Sadeas and he cannot get a darkeyes to come to the palace. *Can you teach me?*

For a moment Kaladin weighs the spear at the king's neck — strike him here, put Dalinar on the throne, be hanged for it and at peace — and recoils, not from the death he would take but from the look on Dalinar's face. Pressed for honesty he answers yes, he thinks Elhokar a bad king; pressed for advice, he tells him to step down for the good of Alethkar.

At the door, on the way out, Elhokar stops without turning. He gives Kaladin two things he did not have to give. He says that when Kaladin came, the shadows he sees in mirrors and at the corners of his eyes — the ones that whisper — went away. He says he is sorry for what he did over the Amaram challenge; that watching Kaladin fight to save Adolin and defend Renarin had made him jealous; and that the disaster with Sadeas was his own fault, not Kaladin's. Dalinar was right. Then he walks out into the rain, leaving Kaladin more rattled by the man's sincerity than by his arrogance.