Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

Dalinar looked over at her.

“It’s like you only live when you can fight,” she continued. “When you can kill. Like a blackness from old stories. You live only by taking lives from others.”

With that pale hair and light golden skin, she was like a glowing gemstone. She was a sweet, loving woman who deserved better than the treatment he gave her. He forced himself to go back and sit down beside her.

“I still think the flamespren are playing,” she said.

“I’ve always wondered,” Dalinar said. “Are they made of fire themselves? It looks like they are, and yet what of emotion spren? Are angerspren then made of anger?”

Evi nodded absently.

“And what of gloryspren?” Dalinar said. “Made of glory? What is glory? Could gloryspren appear around someone who is delusional, or perhaps very drunk—who only thinks they’ve accomplished something great, while everyone else is standing around mocking them?”

“A mystery,” she said, “sent by Shishi.”

“But don’t you ever wonder?”

“To what end?” Evi said. “We will know eventually, when we return to the One. No use troubling our minds now about things we cannot understand.”



Dalinar narrowed his eyes at the flamespren. That one did have a sword. A miniature Shardblade.

“This is why you brood so often, husband,” Evi said. “It isn’t healthy to have a stone curdling in your stomach, still wet with moss.”

“I … What?”

“You must not think such strange thoughts. Who put such things into your mind anyway?”

He shrugged, but thought of two nights before, staying up late and drinking wine beneath the rain canopy with Gavilar and Navani. She’d talked and talked about her research into spren, and Gavilar had simply grunted, while making notations in glyphs on a set of his maps. She’d spoken with such passion and excitement, and Gavilar had ignored her.

“Enjoy the moment,” Evi told him. “Close your eyes and contemplate what the One has given you. Seek the peace of oblivion, and bask in the joy of your own sensation.”

He closed his eyes as she suggested, and tried to simply enjoy being here with her. “Can a man actually change, Evi? Like those spren change?”

“We are all different aspects of the One.”

“Then can you change from one aspect to another?”

“Of course,” Evi said. “Is not your own doctrine about transformation? About a man being Soulcast from crass to glorious?”

“I don’t know if it’s working.”

“Then petition the One,” she said.

“In prayer? Through the ardents?”

“No, silly. Yourself.”

“In person?” Dalinar asked. “Like, at a temple?”

“If you wish to meet the One in person, you must travel to the Valley,” she said. “There you can speak with the One, or to his avatar, and be granted—”

“The Old Magic,” Dalinar hissed, opening his eyes. “The Nightwatcher. Evi, don’t say things like that.” Storms, her pagan heritage popped up at the strangest times. She could be talking good Vorin doctrine, then out came something like that.

Fortunately, she spoke of it no more. She closed her eyes and hummed softly. Finally, a knock came at the outer door to his rooms.

Hathan, his room steward, would answer that. Indeed, Dalinar heard the man’s voice outside, and that was followed by a light rap on the chamber door. “It is your brother, Brightlord,” Hathan said through the door.

Dalinar leaped, opening the door and passing the short master-servant. Evi followed, trailing along with one hand touching the wall, a habit of hers. They passed open windows that looked down upon a sodden Kholinar, flickering lanterns marking where people moved through the streets.

Gavilar waited in the sitting room, dressed in one of those new suits with the stiff jacket and buttons up the sides of the chest. His dark hair curled to his shoulders, and was matched by a fine beard.

Dalinar hated beards; they got caught in your helm. He couldn’t deny its effect on Gavilar though. Looking at Gavilar in his finery, one didn’t see a backwater thug—a barely civilized warlord who had crushed and conquered his way to the throne. No, this man was a king.

Gavilar rapped a set of papers against the palm of his hand.

“What?” Dalinar asked.

“Rathalas,” Gavilar said, shoving the papers toward Evi as she entered.

“Again!” Dalinar said. It had been years since he’d visited the Rift, that giant trench where he’d won his Shardblade.

“They’re demanding your Blade back,” Gavilar said. “They claim that Tanalan’s heir has returned, and deserves the Shard, as you never won it in a true contest.”

Dalinar felt cold.

“Now, I know this to be patently false,” Gavilar said, “because when we fought at Rathalas all those years ago, you said you dealt with the heir. You did deal with the heir, did you not, Dalinar?”

He remembered that day. He remembered darkening that doorway, the Thrill pulsing inside him. He remembered a weeping child holding a Shardblade. The father, lying broken and dead behind. That soft voice, pleading.

The Thrill had vanished in a moment.

“He was a child, Gavilar,” Dalinar said, his voice hoarse.

“Damnation!” Gavilar said. “He’s a descendant of the old regime. That was … storms, that was a decade ago. He’s old enough to be a threat! The whole city is going into rebellion, the entire region. If we don’t act, the whole Crownlands could break off.”

Dalinar smiled. The emotion shocked him, and he quickly stifled the grin. But surely … surely someone would need to go and rout the rebels.

He turned and caught sight of Evi. She was beaming at him, though he’d have expected her to be indignant at the idea of more wars. Instead, she stepped up to him and took his arm. “You spared the child.”

“I … He could barely lift the Blade. I gave him to his mother, and told her to hide him.”

“Oh, Dalinar.” She pulled him close.

He felt a swelling of pride. Ridiculous, of course. He had endangered the kingdom—how would people react if they knew the Blackthorn himself had broken before a crisis of conscience? They’d laugh.

In that moment, he didn’t care. So long as he could be a hero to this woman.

“Well, I suppose rebellion was to be expected,” Gavilar said as he stared out the window. “It’s been years since the formal unification; people are going to start asserting their independence.” He raised his hand toward Dalinar, turning. “I know what you want, Brother, but you’ll have to forbear. I’m not sending an army.”

“But—”

“I can nip this thing with politics. We can’t have a show of force be our only method of maintaining unity, or Elhokar will spend his entire life putting out fires after I’m gone. We need people to start thinking of Alethkar as a unified kingdom, not separate regions always looking for an advantage against one another.”

“Sounds good,” Dalinar said.

It wasn’t going to happen, not without the sword to remind them. For once, however, he was fine not being the one to point that out.