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A flashback, thirty-one years before the present. The young Dalinar sits at the high table of a fortified Alethi highstorm waystop, Gavilar on one side and a tall blond Westerner named Toh on the other, the room too hot, the candles pointless when spheres exist. Outside, a highstorm beats at the bunker like a man locked away from the room he wants. Inside, slabs of pork and bowls of lanka claws in peppery broth, the wine Dalinar orders by the jugful, the women dining elsewhere, Sadeas holding quiet court across the hall with the lighteyes whose loyalties he is going to either turn or arrange duels for. It feels too polite. Where is the music, the laughter, the women.

Toh is being walked through Alethi siege and storm tactics by Gavilar — how holdings make a campaign possible, how Soulcasters make starvation impossible, how a city's walls usually fall to a hilltop battery long before its food does. He is impressed and says so: half the world's Blades and Plates sit in Vorin kingdoms. *The Heralds themselves favor you.*

Dalinar's problem at the table is more immediate. He has misplaced his belt knife and can't cut his pork. He lent it to Teleb — no, he didn't, Teleb gave it back at the saddle. He sighs, stands, throws aside the door bar, and walks out into the highstorm to look for it. Lightning. Wind that knocks him into the wall. A glowing many-legged something stalking in the dark distance — he gives it a rude gesture and pushes back inside, streaming water, ignores the room of staring faces, and resumes his seat. *Lost my storming knife,* he says, and takes a loud slurp of rainwater out of his mug. The Westerner across the table excuses himself, paler than even his people get. Gavilar is amused. *I assume people he knows don't casually go for strolls in highstorms.* And: *you may have just proven in one moment a point I've spent half an hour trying to make politically. Toh is wondering if we're strong enough to protect him.*

Navani arrives from the women's hall. Glowing rubies in her hair. Red-lipped, knowing, devastating. Dalinar's breath catches the way it always does. He sets his face and scoots away from her, and the chairs shuffle: Navani between him and Gavilar, Ialai sliding in on her own chair behind Gavilar, Sadeas later joining them on Ialai's lap with a plate of red-sauce claws she immediately attacks.

Reports go around the table on Toh and his sister. The sister, Ialai declares, is a touch vapid — *a touch?* — but honest. The brother is the same and a sycophant. He is also a man without a home, Ialai reminds them: no loyalty, no leverage but the one piece in his hand. The Shardplate he carried out of Rira with his sister, where his kinsmen are reportedly outraged that the heirloom was stolen. He is not carrying it with him. He will not, until he has powerful assurances.

Gavilar sees a use for this beyond the Plate itself. The brother and sister have come east for shelter; if other foreigners start coming to him for treaties, the remaining Alethi highprinces might be brought under the same crown by sheer accreted legitimacy rather than another decade of war.

Ialai cuts in cheerfully. *We're talking about getting Dalinar married.* What. *They want someone who can protect them, someone their family will be too afraid to attack — and they'll want a piece of you. They'll want their blood in the royal line.* Dalinar takes a long pull on his wine. The dainty serving-knife the master-servant has at last brought him is too small for the pork; he bends it in two trying. Across the hall the door to the women's feast hall opens.

A young woman peeks in: tall, almost Alethi-tall, fragile-seeming, sleeveless pale-yellow dress, golden Iriali hair like a candle in a dark room. Evi. Eighteen or nineteen. She scampers to her brother for a drink and tries to take it with her safehand, which is tied off in a yellow pouch because her dress has no sleeves. *She keeps trying to eat with her safehand,* Navani notes. *They go about half-clothed out west,* Ialai confides toward Dalinar — *bet she's quite exotic in the bedroom.*

Gavilar, musing aloud, asks why the Sunmaker failed to leave a lasting empire. The table tries on answers — greedy heirs, no settled successor, the conqueror who couldn't stop conquering — until Gavilar offers his own quiet take. *In all the history of mankind, has any conqueror decided they had enough?* Dalinar wants to eat his storming steak and says so, brandishing the bent toy of a knife. Gavilar looks distantly at him with the look that is becoming a regular thing. *Why are we at war, Brother?*

Dalinar gives him the version he has always given. *Look, this place had stuff. We figured we should have that stuff. So we took it.* *Oh Dalinar,* Sadeas says, laughing, *you are a gem.* Gavilar says there is something he wants Dalinar to read — the Codes of War, from back when Alethkar meant something.

Dalinar is no longer listening. The serving woman clearing Gavilar's plates has a knife behind her back. He kicks his brother's chair leg out from under him; the assassin's blade comes down where Gavilar had been, clips his ear, and buries in the table. Dalinar reaches over the falling Gavilar, catches the assassin by the neck, slams him to the floor, pulls the knife from the table and drives it through the man's chest. He kicks the body to be sure, picks the knife back up, washes the blood off in his wine, and at long last cuts his pork. *Good pork.*

Across the room Toh and Evi are gawking with awe and terror. Around them rare shockspren flash and re-form, triangles of yellow light. Gavilar thanks his brother. Sadeas curses the dishonor of striking during a storm. Navani clutches Gavilar's arm.

*I know I said I wanted you free to make your own choice,* Gavilar starts. *I'll do it,* Dalinar cuts in, eyes forward. Navani is lost to him. He needs to storming accept that. Navani notes politely that the Riran siblings are timid and the negotiation will take time. Gavilar, looking back at the corpse, allows that Dalinar is nothing if not persuasive.