“When do I ride for the Rift?” Dalinar asked.
“You don’t.”
“But you just said—”
“I’m sending you to battle, but not against the Rift. Our kingdom suffers threats from abroad. There is a new dynasty threatening us from Herdaz; a Reshi house has gained power there. And the Vedens have been raiding Alethkar in the southwest. They’re claiming it’s bandits, but the forces are too organized. It’s a test to see how we react.”
Dalinar nodded slowly. “You want me to go fight on our borders. Remind everyone we’re still capable of employing the sword.”
“Exactly. This is a dangerous time for us, Brother. The highprinces question. Is a united Alethkar worth the trouble? Why bow before a king? Tanalan is the manifestation of their questions, but he has been careful not to stray into outright rebellion. If you attack him, the other highprinces could unite behind the rebels. We could shatter the kingdom and have to start all over.
“I will not allow that. I will have a unified Alethkar. Even if I have to hit the highprinces so hard, they are forced to melt together from the heat of it. They need to remember that. Go to Herdaz first, then Jah Keved. Remind everyone why they fear you.”
Gavilar met Dalinar’s eyes. No … he was not soft. He thought like a king now. He sought the long term, but Gavilar Kholin was as determined as ever.
“It will be done,” Dalinar said. Storms, this day had been a tempest of emotion. Dalinar stalked toward the door. He wanted to see the child again.
“Brother?” Gavilar said.
Dalinar turned back and regarded Gavilar, who was bathed by the bleeding light of a fire reaching its end.
“Words are important,” Gavilar said. “Much more than you give them credit for being.”
“Perhaps,” Dalinar said. “But if they were all-powerful, you wouldn’t need my sword, would you?”
“Perhaps. I can’t help feeling words would be enough, if only I knew the right ones to say.”
50. Shash Thirty-Seven
We also instruct that you should not return to Obrodai. We have claimed that world, and a new avatar of our being is beginning to manifest there.
She is young yet, and—as a precaution—she has been instilled with an intense and overpowering dislike of you.
To Dalinar, flying felt much like being on a ship in the ocean.
There was something profoundly disconcerting about being out on the ocean, subject to the winds and currents. Men didn’t control the waves, they merely set out and prayed that the ocean didn’t decide to consume them.
Flying alongside Captain Kaladin provoked some of the same emotions in Dalinar. On one hand, the view over the Shattered Plains was magnificent. He felt he could almost see the pattern to it that Shallan mentioned.
On the other hand, this kind of travel was deeply unnatural. Winds buffeted them, and if you moved your hands or arched your back in the wrong way, you were sent in a different direction from everyone else. Kaladin had to constantly zip back and forth, righting one of them that got blown off-course. And if you looked down, and paused to consider exactly how high up you were …
Well, Dalinar was not a timid man, but he was still glad of Navani’s hand in his.
On his other side flew Elhokar, and beyond him were Kadash and a pretty young ardent who served as one of Navani’s scholars. The five of them were escorted by Kaladin and ten of his squires. The Windrunners had been training steadily for three weeks now, and Kaladin had finally—after practicing by flying groups of soldiers back and forth to the warcamps—agreed to treat Dalinar and the king to a similar trip.
It is like being on a ship, Dalinar thought. What would it feel like to be up here during a highstorm? That was how Kaladin planned to get Elhokar’s team to Kholinar—fly them at the leading edge of a storm, so his Stormlight was continually renewed.
You’re thinking of me, the Stormfather sent. I can feel it.
“I’m thinking of how you treat ships,” Dalinar whispered, his physical voice lost to the winds—yet his meaning carried, unhampered, to the Stormfather.
Men should not be upon the waters during a storm, he replied. Men are not of the waves.
“And the sky? Are men of the sky?”
Some are. He said this grudgingly.
Dalinar could only imagine how terrible it must be to be a sailor out at sea during a storm. He had taken only short coastwise trips by ship.
No, wait, he thought. There was one, of course. A trip to the Valley …
He barely remembered that voyage, though he could not blame that solely upon the Nightwatcher.
Captain Kaladin swooped over. He was the only one who seemed truly in control of his flying. Even his men flew more like dropped rocks than skyeels. They lacked his finesse, his control. Though the others could help if something went wrong, Kaladin had been the only one Lashing Dalinar and the others. He said he wanted practice, for the eventual flight to Kholinar.
Kaladin touched Elhokar, and the king started to slow. Kaladin then moved down the line, slowing each in turn. He then swept them up so they were close enough to speak. His soldiers stopped and floated nearby.
“What’s wrong?” Dalinar asked, trying to ignore that he was hanging hundreds of feet in the sky.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Kaladin said, then pointed.
With the wind in his eyes, Dalinar had failed to spot the warcamps: ten craterlike circles arrayed along the northwestern edge of the Shattered Plains. From up here, it was obvious they had once been domes. The way their walls curved, like cupping fingers from underneath.
Two of the camps were still fully occupied, and Sebarial had set up forces to lay claim to the nearby forest. Dalinar’s own warcamp was less populated, but had a few platoons of soldiers and some workers.
“We arrived so quickly!” Navani said. Her hair was a wind-tousled mess, much of it having escaped her careful braid. Elhokar hadn’t fared much better—his hair sprayed out from his face like waxed Thaylen eyebrows. The two ardents, of course, were bald and didn’t have such worries.
“Quick indeed,” Elhokar said, redoing a few buttons of his uniform. “This is most promising for our mission.”
“Yeah,” Kaladin said. “I still want to test it more in front of a storm.” He took the king by the shoulder, and Elhokar started to drift downward.
Kaladin sent them each down in turn, and when his feet finally touched stone again, Dalinar heaved a sigh of relief. They were only one plateau over from the warcamp, where a soldier at a watchpost waved to them with eager, exaggerated movements. Within minutes, a troop of Kholin soldiers had surrounded them.
“Let’s get you inside the walls, Brightlord,” their captainlord said, hand on the pommel of his sword. “The shellheads are still active out here.”
“Have they attacked this close to the camps?” Elhokar asked, surprised.
“No, but that doesn’t mean they won’t, Your Majesty.”
Dalinar wasn’t so worried, but said nothing as the soldiers ushered him and the others into the warcamp where Brightness Jasalai—the tall, stately woman Dalinar had put in charge of the camp—met and accompanied them.