POV: navani
Summary
Navani stands on Urithiru's outer Oathgate platform, the wind cracking the Kholin-blue banners overhead like breaking sticks above battalions waiting their turn to transfer. She thinks about banners — the way they organize men, but also the way they paint a target on whoever stands beneath them — and uses the analogy as cover for not thinking about Dalinar leaving again. He joins her with an honor guard of ten. She warns him about Taravangian; he already knows. Through quiet finagling, Taravangian's honor guard has been salted with Alethi, his armies will be stationed away from the command post on the Azish front with extra soldiers in between, and as a final layer Szeth is walking among Dalinar's servants under a Lightweaving that makes him look like a common soldier — the strange sword's sheath physically decorated, since illusion won't stick to it. A second illusion keeps a fake Szeth in his cell.
The governess brings little Gav up with his trunks, saluting stiffly. Dalinar tells him the two of them will be doing strategy, not fighting; Gav declares himself good at strategy and hugs his grandmother before being led off. Navani worries he is young to be going. Dalinar says he owes it to him, that the boy is terrified of being left behind again.
Jasnah arrives by palanquin — odd, Navani notes, that the queen who has worked so hard not to look frail almost always travels by palanquin, while Taravangian, who genuinely needs one, refuses. The hug between mother and daughter is the most awkward Navani has ever been part of. Jasnah catches herself sounding like a treatise and apologises for being so absent from family, then thanks her mother for being constant through the rise of kingdoms. Navani asks her to watch little Gav and to keep both Dalinar and the boy clear of the fighting; Jasnah promises.
She thinks across the field: most of the original highprinces are now in field commands, Vamah, Thanadal and Sadeas long since replaced with distant scions (Roion's son struggling for that very reason). Aladar, Sebarial and Hatham are dependable; Bethab and his wife have fallen into line; Ruthar is the lone holdout, and Jasnah — who hates loose ends — will likely deal with him in her own time.
Sebarial wanders past, dressed almost respectably these days, and jokes about taking bets on how soon Taravangian will betray them; Navani calls him glib and points out he is one of the only people in Roshar who can be relied on to actually have stood with Dalinar when others wouldn't. As the light of the Oathgate flashes up around the plateau and a scribe waits at her workstation for the spanreed confirmation, Navani notes that banners can sometimes be faster than a spanreed: from the twentieth floor you can read a flag at a glance. Reputations, too, are banners — and she wonders, walking back toward the tower with Sebarial, what banner she actually wants to fly. She had come to the Shattered Plains to chase a life she wanted; instead she keeps finding herself running a kingdom for a man too large for daily tasks. She gives Sebarial his marching orders — bring the warcamps to heel before Dalinar returns, four-and-nine-tenths percent skim, no more — and then, in a softer aside, calls him by the name only Palona uses, *Turi*, and tells him plainly that a woman wonders her worth to a man who seems to value nothing in his life.
Inside the tower, Navani takes a palanquin inward attended by Brightness Anesa, skimming reports on water distribution and stairwell traffic — Urithiru has more random fights than Dalinar's warcamp ever did, and tight quarters seem to be part of the cause. The palanquin lets her out at the atrium on the tower's eastern edge, where a vast corridor rises tens of floors and a hundreds-foot window opens toward the Origin. A few days back a scribe had noticed a too-straight crack in the rock; with Dalinar's permission a Stoneward — Badali, affable, powdery-bearded — has now shaped it open into a sealed chamber inside the wall.
Falilar is already inside taking measurements of what they have found: a fifteen-foot stone model of the entire tower, split open down the middle to show every floor in cross section, the crystal pillar room and two libraries reproduced in miniature. Falilar points out that the model includes a representation of this very chamber — with a doorway shown open that does not exist in the real tower. Navani guesses some of the sealed rooms must have had some other mechanism to open and close, and the Stoneward reports a gemstone embedded in the wall that may have driven it. She files the implication: there may be other windowed rooms in the mountain face, Windrunners could fly out and find them. Falilar mentions in passing that his nephew has improved his device, and she should stop by the library when she has time.
As she climbs back into her palanquin, Isabi — one of Falilar's younger apprentices, daughter of a Windrunner — rushes in carrying the blinking red ruby of the mysterious spanreed. Weeks back an unknown correspondent had reached for her once on that reed, furious about her fabrial research, and then vanished. They were trying again. Sanitation reports would wait.