(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Rain falls so dense it no longer reads as wind-driven sheets when Dalinar, Navani, and a soaked Roion stalk toward the command tent, the bridgeman Peet at Dalinar's shoulder. Peet relays what Shallan sent back through the rain: she cannot yet open the Oathgate, two storms are coming — a highstorm and a thing she calls the Everstorm — and they will collide on this plateau. Before Dalinar can step inside, the tent itself rips free in a gust and blows past him trailing maps and ropes. Commander Cael arrives to report through the wind that Aladar has won — the singing Parshendi dropped where they stood, the rest broke and fled, even with Roion's plateau lost they have *won the day* — but the news does not land the way it should. Dalinar orders every force pulled to the round plateau in the southeast. Then Cael points him back west, to red lightning falling in sheets and the sky itself spasming as something vast swirls into being. Nearby a second tent rocks. Adolin crashes out of it on his back, Shardplate leaking Light, helm gone, breastplate cracked, blood streaming from his nose. The man who could do that to a Shardbearer strolls out after him: bowed hairless head, white clothing plastered to his body, Stormlight glowing through shadowed eyes. Gavilar's murderer is on the plateau.

Inside the muraled chamber at the centre of the round plateau, Shallan works the inscriptions and finds no key. Inadara confirms the wall script is all Dawnchant. Pattern suggests she cannot see the puzzle because she is too close to it — *like the Plains themselves* — and sends her to the centre of the floor mosaic where the depictions of the ten orders meet. The shape will not come. Against the wall, Renarin is on his knees in Shardplate, scratching a rock against stone — a sequence of zeros, again and again, written over the mural with the patience of prayer — and screaming that he can see the future itself, that the Almighty has cursed him, that *it's come, we're dead, we're dead.*

Out on the plateau, Dalinar kneels over Adolin in the cooling rain and gives him the speech a father gives a son he will not see again: *when you take the princedom, do not let them corrupt you. You have been a better man from the start. Lead them. Unite them.* Then he walks the ten paces toward the Assassin in White, waves Bridge Four back, and demands his answer. *I am Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar. I do as my masters demand.* The man's calm is a fracture — wide eyes, clenched teeth — and Dalinar reads madness on him. *Thank you,* the assassin tells him, *for extending my agony by not dying easily.* In the lull between the closing storms Dalinar meets him Shardblade against Shardblade and fights on instinct, refusing to think — duck, step, ward, lash for the touching hand — and for the first time in his life holds his own against the slayer of kings. He does not win. A fist breaks his ribs. He sinks to a knee, and in that moment a stranger truth lands than the wound: even sober that night, he could not have saved Gavilar from this creature. The boulder he has carried six years sets itself down.

The assassin steps forward to finish him — and the figure that lunges from behind is not Adolin or a bridgeman but Roion, side-sword in one hand and a dozen of his own soldiers at his back. The assassin cuts the blade from the hilt, slaps a hand against Roion's chest, and Lashes him screaming into the black sky. He sweeps through the escort and a dozen burned-out eyes hit the stones. Roion plummets back down and breaks on the rock with the wet sound of a man who will not rise again. Adolin, the Shardplate finally off him with Skar and Drehy's help, charges in Smokestance and is batted aside like a child. *Nothing can beat it,* he realises. He and his father form their last circle of bridgemen; Khal's relief force is coming, but not in time. They charge together. The assassin leaps, crashes back down like a comet, breaks the line. He turns away — *it is finished, I am done* — then turns again and Lashes Dalinar into the black sky to kill him with a single touch to the chest. The highprince does not scream as the sky swallows him.

On his way to one more body on his own time, the assassin snaps Adolin's wrist with a slap of his Blade and stops, staring up. Something glowing is drifting back down through the dark — a man, slow as a falling leaf, white Light streaming from him in wisps, like one of the Heralds descending out of the Tranquiline Halls. It is Dalinar. And in front of him a blazing fireball crashes onto the stone with a ring of expanding white smoke marked, for a single second, with a sword-shaped glyph. In the centre crouches a man in a long bridgeman coat, slave brands on his forehead, eyes burning brighter than the assassin's, glowing Shardblade in his hand. *You sent him to the sky to die, assassin,* Kaladin says, Stormlight puffing from his lips. *But the sky and the winds are mine. I claim them, as I now claim your life.*