(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

In the sitting room of Dalinar's complex Adolin takes up the abdication argument one more time, but with the angle reversed. He has been thinking, he tells his father, about the last two weeks. About how Sadeas negotiated. About how the lesser highprinces are at last listening. About how the camps have begun to look at the Kholin banner with something other than embarrassment. *That is why, Father*, he says, *you absolutely cannot abdicate to me. No matter what we discover with the visions.* He does not have what his father has. The kingdom does not need Adolin right now. It needs Dalinar.

Navani sets a sheet of paper down on the table between them as he finishes. She has had her scribes transcribe — letter by letter, by feel, by listening at the door of the top room across a season — the gibberish Dalinar has been speaking in the visions when he comes out of them. Pages and pages of it. It is not, the scribes say at first, gibberish. It is a language. They have run the syllables and the cadences against every linguistic catalogue Jasnah has compiled over fifteen years of work, and they have a match.

They believe it is the Dawnchant — the lost speech of the Radiants and the Heralds, a language dead these four thousand years and recorded only in fragmentary inscriptions in the deep stone of Akinah and the carvings at the Silver Kingdoms sites. Unless someone in the room can imagine a way that an Alethi warlord could have learned a dead language by accident and begun speaking it in his sleep, the visions are real. They are not a sickness. The room goes silent for a long beat. Navani picks up the page, smooths it on her lap, and says — quietly, gently, with a small careful smile — *Now, Dalinar, I want you to describe this most recent vision as accurately as possible. Take your time. Begin at the beginning.*