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Hours after the Dawnchant proof — after Adolin has gone, after Renarin has gone, after the scribes have packed up their pages and left — Dalinar and Navani sit alone in the sitting room debriefing the most recent vision. He tells her, hesitantly, that the king he has been speaking with across many of the visions is, he believes, Nohadon himself. He cannot prove it. He just knows. He describes what the king's voice does at the end of a sentence; he describes the way the king draws breath before a heavy word; he describes a tilt of the chin he has only ever seen in one carving at the Kholinar palace. Navani listens and does not interrupt.

The conversation drifts, after a while, away from the vision. She sits closer to him on the bench. He becomes acutely aware of where her arm is resting against his. The night-lamps are low. He has spent a year stepping toward her and stepping away from her in the gardens of the king's complex, and the moment that has been waiting for the two of them to stop being clever about it has arrived. She kisses him.

He is elated and ashamed at the same time. He turns his head when she pulls back. *The kiss was yours, Dalinar*, she says quietly. *You seduced me to it.* *Seduced?* *Dalinar, I've never been more open and honest in my life.* *I know* — and here he allows himself the first edge of a smile he has not let himself wear in weeks — *that was the seductive part.* She gets up, gathers her shawl, and walks out through the antechamber with the new lightness of a woman who has been carrying something heavy and has finally set it down. The door closes behind her. Dalinar stands in the silence and feels, against everything written in the Codes he has tried to live by, as if the world has somehow become more right for having, in this one specific way, gone wrong.