POV: dalinar
Summary
In a warcamp building in Emul, Dalinar at last manages to draw on a Bondsmith ability he has been hunting for weeks. He touches a finger to a young volunteer soldier's forehead, closes his eyes, and concentrates — and sees them, finally, the hair-thin white lines reaching out from the man into the darkness in every direction. Some glow brighter than others, some shift, but one end of each remains anchored to the place his finger rests. He tries to touch one and his hand passes through.
In the back of his mind the Stormfather rumbles that he had not been sure the thing could be done. The power was tempered by Honor for the good of all ever since the destruction of Ashyn, and only one Bondsmith Dalinar's spren remembers has spoken of the lines: Melishi, the last Bondsmith before the Recreance, when Honor was already dying and possibly mad. Dalinar asks what he can do with them. The Stormfather does not know. He can say only that what Dalinar sees are the Connections all people have — to other people, to spren, to time and reality itself; that everything is Connected by a vast lattice of interactions, passions, thoughts, fates; and that spren have these too, and the bond that makes a Radiant is similar but far stronger. The little ones may not, the Stormfather suspects, be exploitable at all. He offers Dalinar one of Melishi's old parables: imagine two brothers who each draw a coloured cloth from a bag, shut it away unseen, then travel to opposite ends of the land and on the same day at the same hour open the box and look. The one who sees red knows the other has yellow. They shared a bond of knowledge; the Connection exists, but knowing it does not always let an ordinary man use it. A Bondsmith though — there the parable trails off.
Dalinar lifts his finger and opens his eyes, thanks the nervous soldier and watches him retreat toward the still-disguised Szeth at the door. He checks the fabrial clock on his arm. Jasnah and the others are due back from the front soon, the battle won, the celebrations done, all of it without him. It feels strange. He is shut out of so much: of Navani and the tower because he has no information to act on, of Adolin off in Shadesmar like the brother in the parable, distant and reachable only by the thinnest of lines. He tells himself firmly that he too has a part in this — master these powers, best Odium, think on a scale bigger than one battle or one war — but his progress is so slow that he wonders if this is what Jasnah felt all her years chasing secrets nobody believed in. Then he collects Szeth and turns his path through the camp toward the prison, because there is one duty he has been putting off, and he can put it off no longer.
The warcamp has no real prison; military discipline rarely needs one. So they have taken a sturdy house, bricked over the upper-floor windows, reinforced the door, and set Dalinar's best soldiers on it. The guards salute and unlock for him. None of them comments on Dalinar entering with only a single guard; none of them imagines the precautions are about the prisoner rather than would-be rescuers, or wonders whether the Blackthorn can handle himself against an elderly statesman. They have no idea, even now, how dangerous Taravangian is. Inside, on a stool near the far wall, the old man sits watching a single ruby he has set in the corner as a kind of hearth. He turns and smiles, and Dalinar feels Szeth tense by the door.
Taravangian opens the conversation himself. He had wondered if Dalinar would come, nearly two weeks after his betrayal. Dalinar admits, after a moment of pride, that he had wanted certain tasks accomplished first so that any influence Taravangian had over him would matter less. Taravangian asks straight out what those tasks were — has he survived the Veden betrayal, has he clashed with Odium's forces in Emul, et cetera — and Dalinar steels himself against how casually the man names it all, then asks the simple question that has been waiting between them: why. Why did he do it.
Because, Taravangian says, Dalinar is going to lose. Dalinar protests; Taravangian shakes his head. The painted-on Radiants of this age are imitations of imitations: even the original orders, with Honor still alive, only barely survived the wars they fought. Now there is no Honor and there is a god across the table. Dalinar feels not surprise but cold, then disappointment. Their old discussions about what it was to be a king had grown harder once he had learned that Taravangian, like himself, had taken the throne of Jah Keved with murder; he had been talking to a man like himself. And in the end his friend stepped off the cliff.
He tells Taravangian he is not nearly so smart as he thinks. Taravangian agrees — except that he was, once. He visited the Old Magic, he says, and met not just the Nightwatcher but the other one Dalinar had met: Cultivation. She did not refuse his plea for the capacity to stop what was coming. She made him brilliant, transcendently so, for a day. Only one day. He has often wished for another and never had one. Most days he is some shade of average; some days he is sharp but his feelings flatten to annoyance; some days he is dim but a syllable can break him into tears. That single day was, he believes, all she wanted him to have — long enough to see for himself. There was no way to save Roshar.
Dalinar refuses to accept that nobody can read the future perfectly, even Odium, and that absolute certainty was not on offer even to the best foresight any mortal has had. Taravangian sets him a thought experiment: put yourself in my chair. You see a future where you can save Alethkar — your home, your people, everything you love — by accepting a calm and reasonable bargain. Or you can spurn it and reach for a wild long shot at saving the world entire, and if you fall short you lose everything. Would you not, like the soldier you have always been, accept your losses and do what you could? Dalinar asks if that means he sold them out, and Taravangian answers: for a price. He preserved Kharbranth. He tried, he says, for more. Life before death. Dalinar snaps that he is not to sully those words with this; Taravangian shoots back that Dalinar is standing on his high tower again, very noble while he drags every human to death with him, dying with his oaths intact and his neighbours dead.
The old digs come too: when, exactly, did the Blackthorn keep an oath to the Alethi he protected? When he burned them alive in their cities? Dalinar takes the cut and refuses to rise to it. He is not that man any longer. He takes the next step. Taravangian softens: yes, that is true, and the gibe was useless. But it is a pity, because that man — the man who would burn one city to save the kingdom — Taravangian could have worked with. The Dalinar he has become, by Taravangian's reading, is no longer guided by an ideal of protection; if he were he would surrender. His ideal is never giving up, and Taravangian sees pride in that. Dalinar argues back: it is not that he has given up before the battle began, like Taravangian; it is that he refuses to declare its outcome certain. Strangely, Taravangian agrees, then nods toward the second stool — one he says he carried down from upstairs in case Dalinar visited — and invites him to sit as they once did. Dalinar hesitates, decides refusal is its own kind of pride, and sits.
Taravangian, however, has noticed Szeth. There is a narrowing of his eyes Dalinar hopes he is imagining and knows he is not. The old king lets it pass. He returns to the main thread: he would die happy, he says, to be proved wrong. Dalinar tells him bluntly that he does not believe him — the price of being wrong is to not be the one who saved them, and Taravangian could not bear it. They argue about how Taravangian's brilliance was spent: not founding a coalition, not refounding the Radiants, but dispatching an assassin and seizing the throne of Jah Keved so he would be in a position to negotiate with Odium. Dalinar bats the cover-story aside — he wanted to be emperor, he made a play for Alethkar, he sent Szeth at Dalinar instead of speaking to him. Taravangian, almost gently, reminds the Blackthorn that the man he was at the start of this would not have listened. Dalinar asks why a man who could read a war's ending could not read a man who was changing. Taravangian admits he predicted Dalinar would fall and join Odium if left alive, or fight the new world at every step; Odium had thought the same. They were both wrong, Dalinar says. Taravangian rubs his brow and admits, with no more brilliance available to him, that he does not have the intelligence today to explain his certainty. Odium will arrange things, he insists, so that no matter what Dalinar chooses, the god wins. That is what he is sure of. And so he made the difficult decision to save at least one city.
Dalinar pivots. He thinks Taravangian saw an emperor's seat and took it — wanted power so he could give it up, wanted to be the king who bore the burden because he likes the bearing. Taravangian says no: he let himself be taken so that his friends and family could escape, knowing Dalinar's wrath would fall on him rather than on Kharbranth, where those who knew what he had done are no longer in government. To attack Kharbranth would be to attack innocents, and Dalinar — Taravangian smiles a little — knows he never would. Dalinar feels an angerspren boil up at his feet at the truth of it, and admits silently that the city is innocent the way Veden soldiers and Dalinar himself once were innocent: pawns in Taravangian's schemes.
They circle back to what might have been. Dalinar says it could have gone differently — he can imagine a world in which Taravangian said the oaths, a world in which Taravangian would have made a better Radiant leader than he himself ever could. He feels they were so close. Taravangian shakes his head: a monarch cannot make such oaths and expect to keep them; a greater need can always arise. Then a king cannot be moral, Dalinar says. Or perhaps, Taravangian counters, a man can be moral and still break oaths. No, Dalinar says: oaths are part of what define morality; a good man strives to do what he has committed to do. Taravangian clasps his hands, calls him a true son of Tanavast, and says he believes Dalinar means every word — but that the way out of this, if there is one, will not be found in oaths or in coalitions of noble leaders, only in the older work the Blackthorn was once so fluent in. Dalinar refuses: methods and ideal must match.
They sit a long while in silence then, watching the ruby. Dalinar has come expecting a fight and finds himself feeling more sorrow than anger — the regret in both of them for what they have lost. At last he stands and gives Taravangian his own old line back: that to be a king is to accept pain, to do what others cannot, to bear the agonies of decisions so that others may live pure lives. Taravangian agrees, then volunteers something: he has said his goodbyes and intentionally made himself worthless to Odium and to his former compatriots, so Dalinar will not be able to use his life as leverage with anyone. Dalinar asks if he is asking to be executed. Taravangian answers that he is simply being clear: he has no further reason to manipulate, and Dalinar may kill him.
Dalinar refuses. Taravangian, he says, has lived his convictions, however misguided; now Dalinar will live his. And on the day he faces Odium and wins, he will bring Taravangian to that meeting, and on that day, if Taravangian's wish to be proven wrong is sincere and was never about being right or about gaining power, they can embrace, knowing it is over. Old friend. Taravangian looks at him with tears in his eyes and whispers a toast to that day, and that embrace.
Dalinar collects Szeth at the door, then pauses to tell the guards to bring Taravangian a comfortable chair and a little more light. As they walk away, Szeth — who rarely offers opinions — quietly tells him not to trust the man's lies: he pretends to be done plotting, but there is always more to him. Dalinar nods. He has not yet had a conversation with Taravangian he could walk away from without going back over it; that, he tells Szeth, is part of why he was so reluctant to come at all. Szeth says he is wise, and seems to consider the matter closed.