Oathbringer

  “I hate you,” she said, drinking his water next.

  Adolin chuckled.

  “Oh!” Pattern said suddenly, bursting up from the bowl to hover in the air. “You were talking about mating! I’m to make sure you don’t accidentally mate, as mating is forbidden by human society until you have first performed appropriate rituals! Yes, yes. Mmmm. Dictates of custom require following certain patterns before you copulate. I’ve been studying this!”

  “Oh, Stormfather,” Shallan said, covering her eyes with her freehand. A few shamespren even peeked in for a glimpse before vanishing. Twice in one week.

  “Very well, you two,” Pattern said. “No mating. NO MATING.” He hummed to himself, as if pleased, then sank down onto a plate.

  “Well, that was humiliating,” Shallan said. “Can we maybe talk about those books you brought? Or ancient Vorin theology, or strategies for counting grains of sand? Anything other than what just happened? Please?”

  Adolin chuckled, then reached for a slim notebook that was on top of the pile. “May Aladar sent teams to question Vedekar Perel’s family and friends. They discovered where he was before he died, who last saw him, and wrote down anything suspicious. I thought we could read the report.”

  “And the rest of the books?”

  “You seemed lost when Father asked you about Makabaki politics,” Adolin said, pouring some wine, merely a soft yellow. “So I asked around, and it seems that some of the ardents hauled their entire libraries out here. I was able to get a servant to locate you a few books I’d enjoyed on the Makabaki.”

  “Books?” Shallan said. “You?”

  “I don’t spend all my time hitting people with swords, Shallan,” Adolin said. “Jasnah and Aunt Navani made very certain that my youth was filled with interminable periods spent listening to ardents lecture me on politics and trade. Some of it stuck in my brain, against my natural inclinations. Those three books are the best of the ones I remember having read to me, though the last one is an updated version. I thought it might help.”

  “That’s thoughtful,” she said. “Really, Adolin. Thank you.”

  “I figured, you know, if we’re going to move forward with the betrothal…”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” Shallan said, suddenly panicked.

  “I don’t know. You’re a Radiant, Shallan. Some kind of half-divine being from mythology. And all along I was thinking we were giving you a favorable match.” He stood up and started pacing. “Damnation. I didn’t mean to say it like that. I’m sorry. I just … I keep worrying that I’m going to screw this up somehow.”

  “You worry you’re going to screw it up?” Shallan said, feeling a warmth inside that wasn’t completely due to the wine.

  “I’m not good with relationships, Shallan.”

  “Is there anyone who actually is? I mean, is there really someone out there who looks at relationships and thinks, ‘You know what, I’ve got this’? Personally, I rather think we’re all collectively idiots about it.”

  “It’s worse for me.”

  “Adolin, dear, the last man I had a romantic interest in was not only an ardent—forbidden to court me in the first place—but also turned out to be an assassin who was merely trying to obtain my favor so he could get close to Jasnah. I think you overestimate everyone else’s capability in this regard.”

  He stopped pacing. “An assassin.”

  “Seriously,” Shallan said. “He almost killed me with a loaf of poisoned bread.”

  “Wow. I have to hear this story.”

  “Fortunately, I just told it to you. His name was Kabsal, and he was so incredibly sweet to me that I can almost forgive him for trying to kill me.”

  Adolin grinned. “Well, it’s nice to hear that I don’t have a high bar to jump—all I have to do is not poison you. Though you shouldn’t be telling me about past lovers. You’ll make me jealous.”

  “Please,” Shallan said, dipping her bread in some leftover sweet curry. Her tongue still hadn’t recovered. “You’ve courted, like, half the warcamps.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Isn’t it? From what I hear, I’d have to go to Herdaz to find an eligible woman you haven’t pursued.” She held out her hand to him, to help her to her feet.

  “Are you mocking my failings?”

  “No, I’m lauding them,” she said, standing up beside him. “You see, Adolin dear, if you hadn’t wrecked all those other relationships, you wouldn’t be here. With me.” She pulled close. “And so, in reality, you’re the greatest at relationships there ever was. You ruined only the wrong ones, you see.”

  He leaned down. His breath smelled of spices, his uniform of the crisp, clean starch Dalinar required. His lips touched hers, and her heart fluttered. So warm.

  “No mating!”

  She started, pulling out of the kiss to find Pattern hovering beside them, pulsing quickly through shapes.

  Adolin bellowed a laugh, and Shallan couldn’t help joining in at the ridiculousness of it. She stepped back from him, but kept hold on his hand. “Neither of us is going to mess this up,” she said to him, squeezing his hand. “Despite what might at times seem like our best efforts otherwise.”

  “Promise?” he asked.

  “I promise. Let’s look at this notebook of yours and see what it says about our murderer.”

  In this record, I hold nothing back. I will try not to shy away from difficult topics, or paint myself in a dishonestly heroic light.

  —From Oathbringer, preface

  Kaladin crept through the rains, sidling in a wet uniform across the rocks until he was able to peek through the trees at the Voidbringers. Monstrous terrors from the mythological past, enemies of all that was right and good. Destroyers who had laid waste to civilization countless times.

  They were playing cards.

  What in Damnation’s depths? Kaladin thought. The Voidbringers had posted a single guard, but the creature had simply been sitting on a tree stump, easy to avoid. A decoy, Kaladin had assumed, figuring he would find the true guard watching from the heights of the trees.

  If there was a hidden guard though, Kaladin had missed spotting them—and they’d missed Kaladin in equal measure. The dim light served him well, as he was able to settle between some bushes right at the edge of the Voidbringer camp. Between trees they had stretched tarps, which leaked horribly. In one place they’d made a proper tent, fully enclosed with walls—and he couldn’t see what was inside.

  There wasn’t enough shelter, so many sat out in the rain. Kaladin spent a torturous few minutes expecting to be spotted. All they had to do was notice that these bushes had drawn in their leaves at his touch.

  Nobody looked, fortunately. The leaves timidly peeked back out, obscuring him. Syl landed on his arm, hands on her hips as she surveyed the Voidbringers. One of them had a set of wooden Herdazian cards, and he sat at the edge of the camp—directly before Kaladin—using a flat surface of stone as a table. A female sat opposite him.

  They looked different from what he expected. For one thing, their skin was a different shade—many parshmen here in Alethkar had marbled white and red skin, rather than the deep red on black like Rlain from Bridge Four. They didn’t wear warform, though neither did they wear some terrible, powerful form. Though they were squat and bulky, their only carapace ran along the sides of their forearms and jutted out at their temples, leaving them with full heads of hair.

  They still wore their simple slave smocks, tied at the waists with strings. No red eyes. Did that change, perhaps, like his own eyes?

  The male—distinguished by a dark red beard, the hairs each unnaturally thick—finally placed a card on the rock next to several others.

  “Can you do that?” the female asked.

  “I think so.”

  “You said squires can’t capture.”

  “Unless another card of mine is touching yours,” the male said. He scratched at his beard. “I think?”

  Kaladin felt cold, like the rainwater was see
ping in through his skin, penetrating all the way to his blood and washing through him. They spoke like Alethi. Not a hint of an accent. With his eyes closed, he wouldn’t have been able to tell these voices from those of common darkeyed villagers from Hearthstone, save for the fact that the female had a deeper voice than most human women.

  “So…” the female said. “You’re saying you don’t know how to play the game after all.”

  The male began gathering up the cards. “I should know, Khen. How many times did I watch them play? Standing there with my tray of drinks. I should be an expert at this, shouldn’t I?”

  “Apparently not.”

  The female stood and walked over to another group, who were trying to build a fire under a tarp without much success. It took a special kind of luck to be able to get flames going outside during the Weeping. Kaladin, like most in the military, had learned to live with the constant dampness.

  They had the stolen sacks of grain—Kaladin could see them piled underneath one of the tarps. The grain had swollen, splitting several of the sacks. Several were eating soggy handfuls, since they had no bowls.

  Kaladin wished he didn’t immediately taste the mushy, awful stuff in his own mouth. He’d been given unspiced, boiled tallew on many occasions. Often he’d considered it a blessing.

  The male who’d been speaking continued to sit on his rock, holding up a wooden card. They were a lacquered set, durable. Kaladin had occasionally seen their like in the military. Men would save for months to get a set like this, that wouldn’t warp in the rain.

  The parshman looked so forlorn, staring down at his card, shoulders slumped.

  “This is wrong,” Kaladin whispered to Syl. “We’ve been so wrong.…” Where were the destroyers? What had happened to the beasts with the red eyes that had tried to crush Dalinar’s army? The terrible, haunting figures that Bridge Four had described to him?

  We thought we understood what was going to happen, Kaladin thought. I was so sure.…

  “Alarm!” a sudden, shrill voice called. “Alarm! You fools!”

  Something zipped through the air, a glowing yellow ribbon, a streak of light in the dim afternoon shade.

  “He’s there,” the shrill voice said. “You’re being watched! Beneath those shrubs!”

  Kaladin burst up through the underbrush, ready to suck in Stormlight and be away. Though fewer towns had any now, as it was running out again, he had a little left.

  The parshmen seized cudgels made from branches or the handles of brooms. They bunched together and held the sticks like frightened villagers, no stance, no control.

  Kaladin hesitated. I could take them all in a fight even without Stormlight. He’d seen men hold weapons like that many times before. Most recently, he’d seen it inside the chasms, when training the bridgemen.

  These were no warriors.

  Syl flitted up to him, prepared to become a Blade. “No,” Kaladin whispered to her. Then he held his hands to the sides, speaking more loudly. “I surrender.”

  I will express only direct, even brutal, truth. You must know what I have done, and what those actions cost me.

  —From Oathbringer, preface

  “Brightlord Perel’s body was found in the same area as Sadeas’s,” Shallan said, pacing back and forth in her room as she flipped through pages of the report. “That can’t be a coincidence. This tower is far too big. So we know where the murderer is prowling.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Adolin said. He lounged with his back against the wall, coat unbuttoned while tossing a small leather ball filled with dried grain into the air and catching it again. “I just think the murders could have been done by two different people.”

  “Same exact method of murder,” Shallan said. “Body positioned the same way.”

  “Nothing else connecting them,” Adolin said. “Sadeas was slime, widely hated, and usually accompanied by guards. Perel was quiet, well-liked, and known for his administrative prowess. He was less a soldier than a manager.”

  The sun had fully set by now, and they’d set out spheres on the floor for light. The remnants of their meal had been carted away by a servant, and Pattern hummed happily on the wall near Adolin’s head. Adolin glanced at him occasionally, looking uncomfortable, which she fully understood. She’d grown used to Pattern, but his lines were strange.

  Wait until Adolin sees a Cryptic in Shadesmar form, she thought, with a full body but twisting shapes for his head.

  Adolin tossed the little stitched ball into the air and caught it with his right hand—the one that Renarin, amazingly, had healed. She wasn’t the only one practicing with her powers. She was especially glad someone else had a Shardblade now. When the highstorms returned, and they began working the Oathgate in earnest, she’d have help.

  “These reports,” Shallan said, tapping the notebook against her hand, “are both informative and useless. Nothing connects Perel and Sadeas save their both being lighteyes—that and the part of the tower they were in. Perhaps mere opportunity drove the killer’s choice of victims.”

  “You’re saying someone happened to kill a highprince,” Adolin said, “by accident? Like … a back-alley murder outside a pub?”

  “Maybe. Brightness Aladar suggests in here that your father lay down some rules on people moving alone through empty parts of the tower.”

  “I still think there might be two murderers,” Adolin said. “You know … like someone saw Sadeas dead, and figured they could get away with killing someone else, blaming it on the first fellow.”

  Oh, Adolin, Shallan thought. He’d arrived at a theory he liked, and now wouldn’t let it go. It was a common mistake warned of in her scientific books.

  Adolin did have one point—a highprince being murdered was unlikely to be random chance. There were no signs of Sadeas’s Shardblade, Oathbringer, being used by anyone, not even a rumor of it.

  Maybe the second death is a kind of decoy? Shallan thought, riffling through the report again. An attempt to make it seem like random attacks? No, that was too convoluted—and she had no more evidence for it than Adolin had for his theory.

  That did leave her thinking. Maybe everyone was paying attention to these two deaths because they’d happened to important lighteyes. Could there be other deaths they hadn’t noticed because they’d happened to less prominent individuals? If a beggar had been found in Adolin’s proverbial back alley behind a pub, would anyone have remarked upon it—even if he’d been stabbed through the eye?

  I need to get out there among them and see what I can find. She opened her mouth to tell him she should probably turn in, but he was already standing, stretching.

  “I think we’ve done what we can with that,” he said, nodding toward the report. “At least for tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Shallan said, feigning a yawn. “Probably.”

  “So…” Adolin said, then took a deep breath. “There’s … something else.”

  Shallan frowned. Something else? Why did he suddenly look like he was preparing to do something difficult?

  He’s going to break off our betrothal! a part of her mind thought, though she pounced on that emotion and shoved it back behind the curtains where it belonged.

  “Okay, this isn’t easy,” Adolin said. “I don’t want to offend, Shallan. But … you know how I had you eat that man’s food?”

  “Um, yes. If my tongue is particularly spicy in the coming days, I blame you.”

  “Shallan, there’s something similar that we need to talk about. Something about you we can’t just ignore.”

  “I…” I killed my parents. I stabbed my mother through the chest and I strangled my father while singing to him.

  “You,” Adolin said, “have a Shardblade.”

  I didn’t want to kill her. I had to. I had to.

  Adolin grabbed her by the shoulders and she started, focusing on him. He was … grinning?

  “You have a Shardblade, Shallan! A new one. That’s incredible. I dreamed for years of earning my Blade! So many men s
pend their lives with that very dream and never see it fulfilled. And here you have one!”

  “And that’s a good thing, right?” she said, held in his grip with arms pulled tight against her body.

  “Of course it is!” Adolin said, letting go of her. “But, I mean, you’re a woman.”

  “Was it the makeup that tipped you off, or the dress? Oh, it was the breasts, wasn’t it? Always giving us away.”

  “Shallan, this is serious.”

  “I know,” she said, calming her nerves. “Yes, Pattern can become a Shardblade, Adolin. I don’t see what this has to do with anything. I can’t give it away.… Stormfather. You want to teach me how to use it, don’t you?”

  He grinned. “You said that Jasnah was a Radiant too. Women, gaining Shardblades. It’s weird, but it’s not like we can ignore it. What about Plate? Do you have that hidden somewhere too?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. Her heart was beating quickly, her skin growing cold, her muscles tense. She fought against the sensation. “I don’t know where Plate comes from.”

  “I know it’s not feminine, but who cares? You’ve got a sword; you should know how to use it, and custom can go to Damnation. There, I said it.” He took a deep breath. “I mean, the bridgeboy can have one, and he’s darkeyed. Well, he was. Anyway, it’s not so different from that.”

  Thank you, Shallan thought, for ranking all women as something equivalent to peasants. But she held her tongue. This was obviously an important moment for Adolin, and he was trying to be broad-minded.

  But … thinking of what she’d done pained her. Holding the weapon would be worse. So much worse.

  She wanted to hide. But she couldn’t. This truth refused to budge from her mind. Could she explain? “So, you’re right, but—”

  “Great!” Adolin said. “Great. I brought the Blade guards so we won’t hurt each other. I stashed them back at the guard post. I’ll go fetch them.”