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Dalinar meets Highprince Roion in the king's Gallery of Maps — a long Soulcast hall, skylit through clerestory glass, lined floor to ceiling with maps of the Shattered Plains worked at every conceivable scale. The Prime Map takes up the centre of the floor, its plateaus and chasms picked out in coloured stone, with a side-sheet hung beside it that ranks every highprince by gemhearts won that season. Roion's name sits dead last. He does not look at the sheet as he walks in.

Dalinar takes him through the central plateaus and lingers at the Tower — the largest plateau on the Plains, a stone wedge surrounded on three sides by chasms, which the Parshendi have defended against Alethi assaults twenty-seven times in six years without losing once. The mathematics are simple. Any single princedom that attacks the Tower will be outnumbered before it reaches the chrysalis. Two princedoms attacking together could trap the Parshendi against the Tower's geometry in numbers neither side has yet brought to bear. Dalinar does not say *unite them*. He shows Roion the side-sheet by accident, lets his eye linger on it, and lets the proposal hang.

Roion is wary. The only way to attack the Tower without losing the army, he points out evenly, is to be willing to lose soldiers in numbers his princedom cannot replace alone; his is a small house. He is also wary of Dalinar — who has not led a major joint attack with anyone in two years and whose name in the warcamps has begun to be spoken with embarrassment. But the purse from a Tower gemheart is real, and the indignity of last place is real, and Roion is no fool. He agrees to consider it. They part with no firm date and no firm plan, but with the door pried slightly open. Dalinar watches him go and is already arranging in his head the order in which he will approach the others. The voice said *unite them.* He has begun.