POV: the-mink
Summary
Dieno, the Mink lies face-down on a headsman's block in the courtyard of a coastal Herdazian fort on the evening before Dalinar's contest, and complains that a simple beheading is no kind of finale for a man of his reputation. He suggests, with mild professional interest, a boulder and a catapult, or a tower-jump archery contest — good target practice for the soldiery, plus a memorable story for the audience. The Herdazian judiciary reading his charges — a local in a singer-marked robe, conqueror-installed so that the people can be told they have some semblance of self-rule — actually pauses to consider, until one of her warform minders shoves her on.
Inwardly he reviews how this came apart. He had the Windrunners put his troops down a couple days' march from the Herdazian capital, far enough not to alert it, and led them in through a series of caves he had played in as a boy. It had been a brilliant plan; he had been quite proud of it. The years had been less kind to the caves than to him. Three cave-ins (almost certainly Everstorm work, he reflects, that he had not accounted for) stonewalled them in turn and forced his force out into an open stone field, where the moon obligingly emerged at exactly the wrong moment and an entire occupier army had been waiting. The rescue ended in the night. Herdaz would not be saved by him; he would have to hope for Dalinar and the contest, and hope the contest's hour arrived in time for him to see it.
He has one move left, and it is the same move he has always had: get someone to take their eyes off him for two heartbeats. He shouts, loudly, that they might at least use a mallet — for the story, for the song, for the singers' sake. The judiciary, the word "passion" doing faint work on the watching singers, turns to ask whether they have one. The headsman, fatally, looks away to answer. Dieno is out of his ropes in two contortions, has yanked the assistant holding his neck chain off the platform, is on top of the boy in a beat (broken ribs, three months' bed rest, time enough to reconsider serving the invaders), and is gone under the platform with the chain in his hand. The audience — ostensibly the occupiers' own — cheers in spite of itself. He had been counting on that. Every person there had come for a story to tell at the end.
He squeezes between the platform's beams where bulky warform armor cannot follow, comes up at a stair onto the wall, and finds the fort's exits blocked and soldiers on every side, advancing. The seaward battlement shows him only mist on the ocean. A fifty-foot drop onto bare stones is no escape, but it is at least his choice. He acknowledges quietly that he has done all he could for Herdaz — that you cannot stay ahead of the wind forever, not even him — and climbs up to jump.
The ground thumps. The wall shakes. Behind him, soldiers reaching to grab him stop short. Out of the fog walks a greatshell the size of a city, big enough to tower over the entire fort. "Well now," Dieno says. "That's a finale."