“This again?” Dalinar said. “Look, it’s not so complicated. Can’t you remember how it was back when we started?”
“Remind me.”
“Well,” Dalinar said, wagging his bent knife. “We looked at this place here, this kingdom, and we realized, ‘Hey, all these people have stuff .’ And we figured … hey, maybe we should have that stuff. So we took it.”
“Oh Dalinar,” Sadeas said, chuckling. “You are a gem.”
“Don’t you ever think about what it meant though?” Gavilar asked. “A kingdom? Something grander than yourself?”
“That’s foolishness, Gavilar. When people fight, it’s about the stuff. That’s it.”
“Maybe,” Gavilar said. “Maybe. There’s something I want you to listen to. The Codes of War, from the old days. Back when Alethkar meant something.”
Dalinar nodded absently as the serving staff entered with teas and fruit to close the meal; one tried to take his steak, and he growled at her. As she backed away, Dalinar caught sight of something. A woman peeking into the room from the other feast hall. She wore a delicate, filmy dress of pale yellow, matched by her blonde hair.
He leaned forward, curious. Toh’s sister Evi was eighteen, maybe nineteen. She was tall, almost as tall as an Alethi, and small of chest. In fact, there was a certain sense of flimsiness to her, as if she were somehow less real than an Alethi. The same went for her brother, with his slender build.
But that hair. It made her stand out, like a candle’s glow in a dark room.
She scampered across the feast hall to her brother, who handed her a drink. She tried to take it with her left hand, which was tied inside a small pouch of yellow cloth. The dress didn’t have sleeves, strangely.
“She kept trying to eat with her safehand,” Navani said, eyebrow cocked.
Ialai leaned down the table toward Dalinar, speaking conspiratorially. “They go about half-clothed out in the far west, you know. Rirans, Iriali, the Reshi. They aren’t as inhibited as these prim Alethi women. I bet she’s quite exotic in the bedroom.…”
Dalinar grunted. Then finally spotted a knife.
In the hand hidden behind the back of a server clearing Gavilar’s plates.
Dalinar kicked at his brother’s chair, breaking a leg off and sending Gavilar toppling to the ground. The assassin swung at the same moment, clipping Gavilar’s ear, but otherwise missing. The wild swing struck the table, driving the knife into the wood.
Dalinar leaped to his feet, reaching over Gavilar and grabbing the assassin by the neck. He spun the would-be killer around and slammed him to the floor with a satisfying crunch. Still in motion, Dalinar grabbed the knife from the table and pounded it into the assassin’s chest.
Puffing, Dalinar stepped back and wiped the rainwater from his eyes. Gavilar sprang to his feet, Shardblade appearing in his hand. He looked down at the assassin, then at Dalinar.
Dalinar kicked at the assassin to be sure he was dead. He nodded to himself, righted his chair, sat down, then leaned over and yanked the man’s knife from his chest. A fine blade.
He washed it off in his wine, then cut off a piece of his steak and shoved it into his mouth. Finally.
“Good pork,” Dalinar noted around the bite.
Across the room, Toh and his sister were staring at Dalinar with looks that mixed awe and terror. He caught a few shockspren around them, like triangles of yellow light, breaking and re-forming. Rare spren, those were.
“Thank you,” Gavilar said, touching his ear and the blood that was dripping from it.
Dalinar shrugged. “Sorry about killing him. You probably wanted to question him, eh?”
“It’s no stretch to guess who sent him,” Gavilar said, settling down, waving away the guards who—belatedly—rushed to help. Navani clutched his arm, obviously shaken by the attack.
Sadeas cursed under his breath. “Our enemies grow desperate. Cowardly. An assassin during a storm? An Alethi should be ashamed of such action.”
Again, everyone in the feast was gawking at the high table. Dalinar cut his steak again, shoving another piece into his mouth. What? He wasn’t going to drink the wine he’d washed the blood into. He wasn’t a barbarian.
“I know I said I wanted you free to make your own choice in regard to a bride,” Gavilar said. “But…”
“I’ll do it,” Dalinar said, eyes forward. Navani was lost to him. He needed to just storming accept that.
“They’re timid and careful,” Navani noted, dabbing at Gavilar’s ear with her napkin. “It might take more time to persuade them.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Gavilar said, looking back at the corpse. “Dalinar is nothing if not persuasive.”
However, with a dangerous spice, you can be warned to taste lightly. I would that your lesson may not be as painful as my own.
—From Oathbringer, preface
“Now this,” Kaladin said, “isn’t actually that serious a wound. I know it looks deep, but it’s often better to be cut deep by a sharp knife than to be raggedly gouged by something dull.”
He pressed the skin of Khen’s arm together and applied the bandage to her cut. “Always use clean cloth you’ve boiled—rotspren love dirty cloth. Infection is the real danger here; you’ll spot it as red along the outsides of the wound that grows and streaks. There will be pus too. Always wash out a cut before binding it.”
He patted Khen’s arm and took back his knife, which had caused the offending laceration when Khen had been using it to cut branches off a fallen tree for firewood. Around her, the other parshmen gathered the cakes they’d dried in the sun.
They had a surprising number of resources, all things considered. Several parshmen had thought to grab metal buckets during their raid—which had worked as pots for boiling—and the waterskins were going to be a lifesaver. He joined Sah, the parshman who had originally been his captor, among the trees of their improvised camp. The parshman was lashing a stone axehead to a branch.
Kaladin took it from him and tested it against a log, judging how well it split the wood. “You need to lash it tighter,” Kaladin said. “Get the leather strips wet and really pull as you wrap it. If you aren’t careful, it’ll fall off on you midswing.”
Sah grunted, taking back the hatchet and grumbling to himself as he undid the lashings. He eyed Kaladin. “You can go check on someone else, human.”
“We should march tonight,” Kaladin said. “We’ve been in one spot too long. And break into small groups, like I said.”
“We’ll see.”
“Look, if there’s something wrong with my advice…”
“Nothing is wrong.”
“But—”
Sah sighed, looking up and meeting Kaladin’s eyes. “Where did a slave learn to give orders and strut about like a lighteyes?”
“My entire life was not spent as a slave.”
“I hate,” Sah continued, “feeling like a child.” He started rewrapping the axehead, tighter this time. “I hate being taught things that I should already know. Most of all, I hate needing your help. We ran. We escaped. Now what? You leap in, start telling us what to do? We’re back to following Alethi orders again.”
Kaladin stayed silent.
“That yellow spren isn’t any better,” Sah muttered. “Hurry up. Keep moving. She tells us we’re free, then with the very next breath berates us for not obeying quickly enough.”
They were surprised that Kaladin couldn’t see the spren. They’d also mentioned to him the sounds they heard, distant rhythms, almost music.
“ ‘Freedom’ is a strange word, Sah,” Kaladin said softly, settling down. “These last few months, I’ve probably been more ‘free’ than at any time since my childhood. You want to know what I did with it? I stayed in the same place, serving another highlord. I wonder if men who use cords to bind are fools, since tradition, society, and momentum are going to tie us all down anyway.”
“I don’t have traditions,” Sah said. “Or society. But still, my ?
??freedom’ is that of a leaf. Dropped from the tree, I just blow on the wind and pretend I’m in charge of my destiny.”
“That was almost poetry, Sah.”
“I have no idea what that is.” He pulled the last lashing tight and held up the new hatchet.
Kaladin took it and buried it into the log next to him. “Better.”
“Aren’t you worried, human? Teaching us to make cakes is one thing. Giving us weapons is quite another.”
“A hatchet is a tool, not a weapon.”
“Perhaps,” Sah said. “But with this same chipping and sharpening method you taught, I will eventually make a spear.”
“You act as if a fight is inevitable.”
Sah laughed. “You don’t think it is?”
“You have a choice.”
“Says the man with the brand on his forehead. If they’re willing to do that to one of their own, what brutality awaits a bunch of thieving parshmen?”
“Sah, it doesn’t have to come to war. You don’t have to fight the humans.”
“Perhaps. But let me ask you this.” He set the axe across his lap. “Considering what they did to me, why wouldn’t I?”
Kaladin couldn’t force out an objection. He remembered his own time as a slave: the frustration, powerlessness, anger. They’d branded him with shash because he was dangerous. Because he’d fought back.
Dared he demand this man do otherwise?
“They’ll want to enslave us again,” Sah continued, taking the hatchet and hacking at the log next to him, starting to strip off the rough bark as Kaladin had instructed, so they could have tinder. “We’re money lost, and a dangerous precedent. Your kind will expend a fortune figuring out what changed to give us back our minds, and they’ll find a way to reverse it. They’ll strip from me my sanity, and set me to carrying water again.”
“Maybe … maybe we can convince them otherwise. I know good men among the Alethi lighteyes, Sah. If we talk to them, show them how you can talk and think—that you’re like regular people—they’ll listen. They’ll agree to give you your freedom. That’s how they treated your cousins on the Shattered Plains when they first met.”
Sah slammed the hatchet down into the wood, sending a chip fluttering into the air. “And that’s why we should be free now? Because we’re acting like you? We deserved slavery before, when we were different? It’s all right to dominate us when we won’t fight back, but now it’s not, because we can talk?”
“Well, I mean—”
“That’s why I’m angry! Thank you for what you’re showing us, but don’t expect me to be happy that I need you for it. This just reinforces the belief within you, maybe even within myself, that your people should be the ones who decide upon our freedom in the first place.”
Sah stalked off, and once he was gone, Syl appeared from the underbrush and settled on Kaladin’s shoulder, alert—watching for the Voidspren—but not immediately alarmed.
“I think I can sense a highstorm coming,” she whispered.
“What? Really?”
She nodded. “It’s distant still. A day or three.” She cocked her head. “I suppose I could have done this earlier, but I didn’t need to. Or know I wanted to. You always had the lists.”
Kaladin took a deep breath. How to protect these people from the storm? He’d have to find shelter. He’d …
I’m doing it again.
“I can’t do this, Syl,” Kaladin whispered. “I can’t spend time with these parshmen, see their side.”
“Why?”
“Because Sah is right. This is going to come to war. The Voidspren will drive the parshmen into an army, and rightly so, after what was done to them. Our kind will have to fight back or be destroyed.”
“Then find the middle ground.”
“Middle ground only comes in war after lots of people have died—and only after the important people are worried they might actually lose. Storms, I shouldn’t be here. I’m starting to want to defend these people! Teach them to fight. I don’t dare—the only way I can fight the Voidbringers is to pretend there’s a difference between the ones I have to protect and the ones I have to kill.”
He trudged through the underbrush and started helping tear down one of the crude tarp tents for the night’s march.
I am no storyteller, to entertain you with whimsical yarns.
—From Oathbringer, preface
A clamorous, insistent knocking woke Shallan. She still didn’t have a bed, so she slept in a heap of red hair and twisted blankets.
She pulled one of these over her head, but the knocking persisted, followed by Adolin’s annoyingly charming voice. “Shallan? Look, this time I’m going to wait to come in until you’re really sure I should.”
She peeked out at the sunlight, which poured through her balcony window like spilled paint. Morning? The sun was in the wrong place.
Wait … Stormfather. She’d spent the night out as Veil, then slept to the afternoon. She groaned, tossing off sweaty blankets, and lay there in just her shift, head pounding. There was an empty jug of Horneater white in the corner.
“Shallan?” Adolin said. “Are you decent?”
“Depends,” she said, voice croaking, “on the context. I’m decent at sleeping.”
She put hands over her eyes, safehand still wrapped in an improvised bandage. What had gotten into her? Tossing around the symbol of the Ghostbloods? Drinking herself silly? Stabbing a man in front of a gang of armed thugs?
Her actions felt like they’d taken place in a dream.
“Shallan,” Adolin said, sounding concerned. “I’m going to peek in. Palona says you’ve been in here all day.”
She yelped, sitting up and grabbing the bedding. When he looked, he found her bundled there, a frizzy-haired head protruding from blankets—which she had pulled tight up to her chin. He looked perfect, of course. Adolin could look perfect after a storm, six hours of fighting, and a bath in cremwater. Annoying man. How did he make his hair so adorable? Messy in just the right way.
“Palona said you weren’t feeling well,” Adolin said, pushing aside the cloth door and leaning in the doorway.
“Blarg.”
“Is it, um, girl stuff?”
“Girl stuff,” she said flatly.
“You know. When you … uh…”
“I’m aware of the biology, Adolin, thank you. Why is it that every time a woman is feeling a little odd, men are so quick to blame her cycle? As if she’s suddenly unable to control herself because she has some pains. Nobody thinks that for men. ‘Oh, stay away from Venar today. He sparred too much yesterday, so his muscles are sore, and he’s likely to rip your head off.’ ”
“So it’s our fault.”
“Yes. Like everything else. War. Famine. Bad hair.”
“Wait. Bad hair?”
Shallan blew a lock of it out of her eyes. “Loud. Stubborn. Oblivious to our attempts to fix it. The Almighty gave us messy hair to prepare us for living with men.”
Adolin brought in a small pot of warm washwater for her face and hands. Bless him. And Palona, who had probably sent it with him.
Damnation, her hand ached. And her head. She remembered occasionally burning off the alcohol last night, but hadn’t ever held enough Stormlight to completely fix the hand. And never enough to make her completely sober.
Adolin set the water down, perky as a sunrise, grinning. “So what is wrong?”
She pulled the blanket up over her head and pulled it tight, like the hood of a cloak. “Girl stuff,” she lied.
“See, I don’t think men would blame your cycle nearly as much if you all didn’t do the same. I’ve courted my share of women, and I once kept track. Deeli was once sick for womanly reasons four times in the same month.”
“We’re very mysterious creatures.”
“I’ll say.” He lifted up the jug and gave it a sniff. “Is this Horneater white?” He looked to her, seeming shocked—but perhaps also a little impressed.
“Got a little carried
away,” Shallan grumbled. “Doing investigations about your murderer.”
“In a place serving Horneater moonshine?”
“Back alley of the Breakaway. Nasty place. Good booze though.”
“Shallan!” he said. “You went alone? That’s not safe.”
“Adolin, dear,” she said, finally pulling the blanket back down to her shoulders, “I could literally survive being stabbed with a sword through the chest. I think I’ll be fine with some ruffians in the market.”
“Oh. Right. It’s kind of easy to forget.” He frowned. “So … wait. You could survive all kinds of nasty murder, but you still…”
“Get menstrual cramps?” Shallan said. “Yeah. Mother Cultivation can be hateful. I’m an all-powerful, Shardblade-wielding pseudo-immortal, but nature still sends a friendly reminder every now and then to tell me I should be getting around to having children.”
“No mating,” Pattern buzzed softly on the wall.
“But I shouldn’t be blaming yesterday on that,” Shallan added to Adolin. “My time isn’t for another few weeks. Yesterday was more about psychology than it was about biology.”
Adolin set the jug down. “Yeah, well, you might want to watch out for the Horneater wines.”
“It’s not so bad,” Shallan said with a sigh. “I can burn away the intoxication with a little Stormlight. Speaking of which, you don’t have any spheres with you, do you? I seem to have … um … eaten all of mine.”
He chuckled. “I have one. A single sphere. Father lent it to me so I could stop carrying a lantern everywhere in these halls.”
She tried to bat her eyelashes at him. She wasn’t exactly sure how one did that, or why, but it seemed to work. At the very least, he rolled his eyes and handed over a single ruby mark.
She sucked in the Light hungrily. She held her breath so it wouldn’t puff out when she breathed, and … suppressed the Light. She could do that, she’d found. To prevent herself from glowing or drawing attention. She’d done that as a child, hadn’t she?
Her hand slowly reknit, and she let out a relieved sigh as the headache vanished as well.
Adolin was left with a dun sphere. “You know, when my father explained that good relationships required investment, I don’t think this is what he meant.”