POV: dalinar
Summary
Thirty-four years before the main story, a young Dalinar Kholin charges across a smouldering field at the head of his elites — a hand-picked company of soldiers, lighteyes and dark, that he does not call an honor guard because he does not consider himself in need of guarding. The defenders have set their own crops on fire to block the southern approach; Dalinar runs through the smoke with padded armor and an ordinary longsword and counts on momentum to do the rest. A few spearmen drop their weapons and run before he reaches them. The rest are bowled over.
A larger reaction comes down the street: a man on a white mare in steel made to look like Shardplate, with an honor guard and the bearing of someone important. Dalinar needs a challenge. He waves up Jenin, who drops the brightlord's horse with a single shortbow shot — grumbling about the cost — and then Dalinar takes the man hand to hand. He almost loses it: a shield strap snaps under stress and he ends on his knees with his sword tumbling away and his nose broken by a steel gauntlet. The moment the killing blow is coming, something ancient kicks open inside him, the sounds of fighting recede, and clarity floods in. He smiles. The Thrill is the name for it. He hooks the brightlord's ankle with a poleaxe Dym tosses him, then spikes him through the breastplate. Asked why his men have come, Dalinar says only that his brother chooses; he just goes where pointed. He gestures, and Dym finishes the dying man under the armpit.
Dalinar is barely back on his feet when an arrow takes him through the shoulder. A second nearly drops him. He spots the archer on the ridge above the town — close to four hundred yards — and rides up the switchbacks on Fullnight with ten elites at his back, catches a third arrow through his breastplate near the other shoulder, and rolls the archer off a knob with a kick. The bowman lies winded amid spilled black-fletched arrows. Dalinar hauls him up by the collar, finds him a man in his twenties with a blue cheek tattoo and shoulders that could lift a chull, and rather than killing him orders him to pick up his bow and shoot a corpse in a square below to prove the first shot was not luck. The man does. Dalinar tells him welcome to the elites.
The archer protests the absurdity. He shot to kill. Dalinar grants that shooting from a distance shows excellent judgment, then offers him the only price he might still want: the life of Brightlord Yezriar, the local heir. Thakka confirms drily that that one's the dead body in question. Dalinar amends the offer to amnesty for the town — no pillage, no slaves — in exchange for the bowman's allegiance and is unbothered when the answer comes out as a mumble. Thakka, meanwhile, will already be quietly finding the man's family in case he changes his mind.
Down in the town the enemy army has finally surrendered. Dalinar sends orders that the looting stop and rides on through soldiers settled to drink. The Thrill is fading and the dull nothing that always follows is coming up under it, the worst part of his day. He is met at the centre of the captured town by Torol Sadeas in cleaned golden Shardplate — a red-faced young man already older-looking than a year ago — proudly showing off the local highprince's head and his officers' on spears. Sadeas complains that they lost the crown prince and will face a resistance; Dalinar tells him not to worry, given what he just did to the heir.
Dalinar makes him honor the no-pillage promise — over a groan and a remark about Torol's plans for the evening — and accepts in return Torol's familiar lament that he really should get some Shards of his own, if only so the rest of them stop looking bad next to him. He goes himself to reinforce the no-pillage order around the city, then walks his horse back across burnt ground to his camp, done living for the day and resigned to weeks or months before he gets another chance to feel any of it again.