To Weep
POV: eshonai
Summary
Six years before the events of the main story, the listener scout Eshonai works in the western unloading dock of the Kholinar palace, helping her crew lift drums down from a wagon while the Alethi feast above. The treaty between her people and humans is being signed at that table, and most of the listeners who travelled from the Shattered Plains cannot fit into the hall, so the hosts have laid out food and drink for them in the cavern below. Eshonai hums the Rhythm of Awe as she takes in the size and ornament of the place; a year and more among humans has not yet dulled the strangeness of them.
Around her crew a cluster of parshmen hovers, dull-eyed and silent. Gitgeth hums to Peace beside her, his beard sparkling with ruby gemstones; Brianlia watches the parshmen as well and is first to say plainly what nobody on the expedition has yet wanted to say out loud — that these silent ones aren't unfortunate kin in need of help, but property. Klade of the Five had recently purchased a person in Kholinar just to see if it could be done. The parshmen are the dearer sort of slave; the Alethi told the listeners that as if it should make them proud. Eshonai waves the parshmen away to enjoy the music and gets blank stares for it.
Restless, Eshonai leaves the unloading bay and wanders the palace, poking into rooms — paintings, a bedchamber, an indoor privy — and ends by easing open a door onto the king's study. Gavilar himself is inside, away from his own feast, conferring with two officers, two women, and an old man over something on a table. He sees her, sends a tall officer he calls Meridas — Amaram — to bring her back inside, and dismisses the rest.
Alone with her, Gavilar produces a small device of metal and gemstones glowing with red Stormlight. He calls it a fabrial, says it gives off a smidge of warmth, and tells Eshonai his wife's scholars believe a bigger one could heat a room — and that a captive spren inside makes it work. He has, he tells her, learned how the ancestors of the Alethi long ago bound a particular spren in a particular gem and so robbed the parshmen of the ability to take their forms — and he has learned how to reverse it. A new storm. The return of the listeners' gods. The return of the Heralds he believes will follow. A war to unify his squabbling kingdom and lift the world out of what he calls a dull state of transition.
Eshonai hums to Anxiety, then to the Terrors. She tries to tell Gavilar that the listeners no longer worship those gods, that they fled them on purpose by adopting dullform — silencing themselves to the rhythms — and so paying the price every parshman in the world still pays. He is not dissuaded. He shows her a map of Roshar in which the Shattered Plains are only a thumb's width of the whole, and her legs go out from under her with the size of what she has never been allowed to see. Then he sets a different sphere on the table — small, dark, almost violet, glowing with a black light. The forms of power, the old songs say, came of such a light. He tells her to take it to the Five and explain, pats her shoulder, and leaves.
Eshonai runs.
Back at the drums she insists on joining the drummers and beats furiously, all anxiety, while the Five sit at the high table over an uneaten last course and listen to what she has reported. Klade's newly-bought house slave, Venli had been with him when he found the man, is a trained assassin who confessed his skills under pressure — and a voice along the rhythms led Klade to him. The Five take that for a sign. Long ago their ancestors had chosen dullform at any cost to be free of those gods; tonight the same cost will be paid again, only differently.
Eshonai votes with the others and weeps as Klade's Shin slave — dressed in flowing white provided by his master — leaves the hall. Her crewmates have to drag her away from the drums when their turn ends. The music cuts off in the corridors above; in its place, screams. She has consigned the king of Alethkar to death to keep his promised storm from ever blowing.