Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive

“Just tell us,” Elhokar said. “Do not fear reprisal. I must know what the city’s people think.”

Yokska trembled. She was a small, plump woman who wore her long Thaylen eyebrows curled in twin ringlets, and was probably very fashionable in that skirt and blouse. Shallan lingered in the doorway, curious as to what the tailor had to say.

“Well,” Yokska continued, “during the riots, the queen … the queen basically vanished. We’d get proclamations from her, now and then, but they often didn’t make much sense. It all went wrong at the ardent’s death. The city was already in an uproar.… She wrote such awful things, Your Majesty. About the state of the monarchy, and the queen’s faith and…”

“And Aesudan condemned her to death,” Elhokar said. Lit by only a few spheres at the center of their circle, his face was half shadowed. It was a most intriguing effect, and Shallan took a Memory for later sketching.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“It was the dark spren, obviously, who gave the actual order,” Elhokar said. “The dark spren that is controlling the palace. My wife would never be so imprudent as to publicly execute an ardent during such parlous times.”

“Oh! Yes, of course. Dark spren. In the palace.” Yokska sounded relieved to have a rationale for not blaming the queen.

Shallan considered, then noticed a pair of fabric scissors on a ledge nearby. She snatched them, then ducked back into the showroom. She pulled her skirt to the side, then stabbed herself in the leg with the scissors.

The sharp pain seared up her leg and through her body.

“Mmmm,” Pattern said. “Destruction. This … this is not normal for you, Shallan. Too far.”

She trembled at the pain. Blood welled from the wound, but she pressed her hand against it to limit its spread.

There! That had done it. Painspren appeared around her, as if crawling out of the ground—like little disembodied hands. They looked skinless, made of sinew. Normally they were bright orange, but these were a sickly green. And they were also wrong … instead of human hands, these seemed to be from some kind of monster—too distorted, with claws jutting from the sinew.

Shallan eagerly took a Memory, still holding her havah skirt up to keep it from the blood.

“Does that not hurt?” Pattern asked, from where he’d moved onto the wall.

“Of course it does,” Shallan said, her eyes watering. “That was the point.”

“Mmmm…” He buzzed, worried, but he needn’t have been, as Shallan had what she wanted. Satisfied, she took in a little Stormlight and healed up, then used some cloth from her satchel to wipe the blood from her leg. She rinsed her hands and the cloth in the washroom basin. She was surprised at the running water; she hadn’t thought Kholinar had such things.

She took out her drawing pad and returned to the back room’s doorway, where she leaned against the jamb, doing a quick sketch of the strange, twisted painspren. Jasnah would tell her to put down her sketchpad and go sit with the others—but Shallan often paid better attention with a sketchpad in her hands. People who didn’t draw never seemed to understand that.

“Tell us about the palace,” Kaladin said. “The … dark spren, as His Majesty put it.”

Yokska nodded. “Oh, yes, Brightlord.”

Shallan glanced up to catch Kaladin’s reaction at being called Brightlord, but he didn’t show one. His illusory disguise was gone—though Shallan had tucked that sketch away, for possible further use. He’d summoned his Blade earlier in the morning, and he now had eyes as blue as any she’d seen. They hadn’t faded yet.

“There was that unexpected highstorm,” Yokska continued. “And after that, the weather went insane. The rains started going in fits and starts. But oh! When that new storm came, the one with the red lightning, it left a gloom over the palace. So nasty! Dark times. I suppose … suppose those haven’t ended.”

“Where were the royal guards?” Elhokar said. “They should have augmented the Watch, restored order during the rioting!”

“The Palace Guard retreated into the palace, Your Majesty,” Yokska said. “And she ordered the City Watch to barricade into the barracks. They eventually moved to the palace on the queen’s orders. They … haven’t been seen since.”

Storms, Shallan thought, continuing her sketch.

“Oh, I guess I’m jumping about, but I forgot!” Yokska continued. “In the middle of the rioting, a proclamation came from the queen. Oh, Your Majesty. She wanted to execute the city’s parshmen! Well, we all thought she must be—I’m sorry—but we thought she must be mad. Poor things. What have they ever done? That’s what we thought. We didn’t know.

“Well, the queen posted criers all over the city, proclaiming the parshmen to be Voidbringers. And I must say, about that she was right. Yet it was still so strange. She didn’t even seem to notice that half the city was rioting!”

“The dark spren,” Elhokar said, making a fist. “It must be blamed, not Aesudan.”

“Were there reports of any strange murders?” Adolin asked. “Murders, or violence, that came in pairs—a man would die, and then a few days later someone else would be killed in the exact same way?”

“No, Brightlord. Nothing … nothing like that, though there were many who were killed.”

Shallan shook her head. It was a different Unmade here; another ancient spren of Odium. Religion and lore spoke of them vaguely at best, tending to simplistically conflate them into one evil entity. Navani and Jasnah had begun to research them over the last weeks, but they still didn’t know very much.

She finished her sketch of the painspren, then did one of the exhaustionspren they’d seen earlier. She’d managed to glimpse some hungerspren around a refugee on their way. Oddly, those didn’t look any different. Why?

Need more information, Shallan thought. More data. What was the most embarrassing thing she could think of?

“Well,” Elhokar said, “though we didn’t order the parshmen executed, only exiled, at least that order seems to have reached Aesudan. She must have been free enough from the control of the dark forces to heed our words via spanreed.”

Of course, he didn’t mention the logical problems. If the tailor was correct about the dark spren arriving during the Everstorm, then Aesudan had executed the ardent on her own—as that had happened before. Likewise, the order to exile the parshmen would also have come before the Everstorm. And who knew if an Unmade could even influence someone like the queen? The spren in Urithiru had mimicked people, not controlled them.

Yokska did seem to be a little scattered in her retelling of events, so maybe Elhokar could be forgiven for mixing up the timeline. Either way, Shallan needed something embarrassing. When I spilled wine the first time Father gave me some at a dinner party. No … no … something more …