Chapter 101

Few combatants win on board or battlefield without first having won the fight against their own minds.

— Proverbs for Towers and War, Zenaz, date unknown

I am my own. Not his.

The mantra repeated in Venli’s head.

I am my own. Not his.

It seemed at times to be her sister’s voice.

The listeners, Fused, and chasmfiends had spent a fitful night. Now they rose, the offer looming over them. The Five had come to no decisions the night before, and Venli empathized. Serve Odium? How could they possibly do that again?

Their guards were common warforms, but the way they spoke … they were increasingly certain they’d win the Shattered Plains soon. She could hear the humans shouting, and they sounded desperate.

I am my own. Not his.

She walked back to her group in the darkness, then approached the Five and Leshwi. Their camp was in a strangely open part of the chasm, a place where a plateau had been entirely destroyed during the Everstorm’s first arrival.

The Five continued to argue. “He can’t take any of us as hosts for a Fused unless we agree to that specifically,” Estel said. “We could accept his dominance, but never give ourselves to the Fused. That keeps with the spirit of the listeners.”

“I’ll admit,” Kivor whispered, “a part of my soul is relieved to face this question at last. It was coming. Perhaps this is for the best—our people will no longer need to worry about the axe to our throats.”

“We can’t,” Thude whispered. “Rejecting him is what defines us.”

Venli settled down outside their circle. It was so strange to be here again. Beneath another darkened sky. Involved in the fate of her people once more.

“Can we be defined by a negative?” Estel asked softly. “What are we?”

“We listen,” Bila said. “Fused, what do you hear?”

“Sorrow,” Leshwi said, her eyes closed. “Anger. He demands my return.” She hesitated. “Venli, do you sense it?”

“No,” Venli said, scooting forward. Cautious, Venli placed her hand on the Fused’s shoulder. “But I can understand the relief that might come from just … returning to him, and no longer feeling rejected—or afraid.”

Leshwi looked at her hand, then back at Venli. This was an interaction that once would have been brazen. Comforting a Fused? Heresy.

“I have found,” Venli said, “that I no longer need to be afraid.”

After a moment, Leshwi hummed to Resolve.

“Still,” Kivor said. “The Five need to make a choice.”

“If we join this battle,” Bila said, “they’ll use us as fodder at the front of their final assault. Us and the chasmfiends. We’ll be slaughtered.”

“But if it gains you peace for the rest of your people?” Leshwi asked. “We cannot resist a force such as Odium alone. Is this not a worthy sacrifice?” With her elevated way of talking—her accent harking back to the ancient days—it was difficult not to agree with her; she projected authority.

Though Venli could understand the allure, she was revolted by the offer. The others seemed the same, even those who had spoken in favor of accepting it. They glanced at one another, humming to uncomfortable rhythms.

Venli wished she had something that would give them solace. But who was she? She had bent like a twig to his will. She had …

… sworn oaths to seek freedom. To help those in bondage. An idea occurred to her. A desperate, dangerous idea. A counterpoint to what she’d done years before.

Timbre thrummed. Excited.

“Five, if I may speak?” Venli said, as a plan formed in her mind.

Navani was lost in a nightmare.

She knelt on the ground before a low table, sweating, surrounded by laughing women. They mocked her as she struggled with the written word, sounding out each letter.

She was eleven, and had come with her father to the city of Shulin to do business, including a need to settle their family accounts. Her family grazed kevah: midshelled beasts that had been cultivated for their gemhearts useful in Soulcasting meat. Their flesh wasn’t too bad either, and they could graze on flat land, the worst type for farming because of water stagnation.

They paid now for animals purchased the year before. Ranching was a fine living for a lighteyed family who happened to own some cheap land—but it was not well regarded for a man of her father’s dahn.

Time with her father out on hunts or riding the ranch hadn’t been good for Navani’s studies. So she knelt there in the accounting house, not even a teen, holding back tears as women snickered. A ridiculous backwater yokel, whose dress was too big for her and whose hem was stained by crem. With effort, she wrote out the final lines of the contract. She sat up, then listened to the women read, finding her spelling amusing.

Navani hated coming to the city. Hated feeling ignorant.

“Child,” a kindly lesser scribe said, leaning down. “Why not let another more experienced handle this?”

“We only have three scribes,” she said. “One’s having a baby soon. The other two are seeing to our local accounts.” What Navani did here was a formality—they needed the good scribes to ensure nobody was embezzling.

“Your mother?” the scribe asked.

“Mother left,” Navani whispered. “Divorced us.”

The women shared glances. It wasn’t impossible—the right of travel was a divine blessing granted to all but lower-nahn darkeyes, enshrined in Alethi common law for centuries. No person could be forced to work, or live, in one place.

Yet a divorce wasn’t considered proper. Leaving wasn’t a problem, mind you, but why cancel a marriage? Navani’s mother had too much dignity to leave without officially divorcing, but not enough dignity to maintain contact with her daughter.

The laughter turned demonic, and insults started to fly, beating on her like lashes.

Ignorant.

Incapable.

Idiot.

The young Navani, crushed by the experience, had fled, crying. She hadn’t felt like herself for weeks afterward. This had been one of the central moments in her life when … when she’d known … a girl like her couldn’t ever be …

“Lies,” she whispered, looking up. “Repackage them as you wish. I know them now for what they are.”

Suddenly the nightmare had no teeth. The laughter took on a frantic air, the women annoyed to be ignored.

“This seed was buried deep, wasn’t it?” Navani whispered. “Grew into a weed that snarled and choked me for decades, watered by Gavilar once he recognized it. I’ve pulled that weed. Its power withered as its roots died. Begone.”

The vision popped, and she was cast into the chaos.

She hunkered down against the flashes of visions—of other times in her life when she’d been mocked, undermined, attacked. And she started thinking clearly. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been adrift in this place—she cursed herself for not insisting she have a clock like Dalinar’s, but their visit to the Spiritual Realm was supposed to have been a quick test.

She put that failing aside. She needed to find Gavinor, then Dalinar, then get out. Unfortunately, she could see no lines of Connection. Something was different now. And Navani …

Navani saw a pattern to it.

Patterns were one of the pillars of science. And she was a scientist. She had gone toe-to-toe with Raboniel and won. The visions could laugh all they wanted, because each one taught her something. Not about herself, but about them.

Ever since the vision where Mishram had been captured, she’d been swimming through possibilities, and they should have been random. Instead this had been the fourth in a row of escalating intensity and pain. She refused to believe that she was causing her own torment; she was clearly being directed toward painful moments.

She stood up amid the chaos, like a terrible wind blowing past with streams of colorful smoke and mist that briefly took the shapes of people or events. It tugged at her clothing and her hair, which had come loose from its customary braids and bun. Perhaps this was Odium, or maybe it was Dalinar. He had been feeling raw and vulnerable, falling back—regrettably—to old foibles. Perhaps his pain—and worry for the upcoming contest—was somehow dominating the visions, creating echoes that sent her into her darkest days.

I am a scholar, she thought. And I will test hypotheses. My visions have been escalating. Which means …

As the next started to form, she guessed it would be Gavilar. On one of the days near the end, when they’d fought constantly. The vision came together: her study in the palace of Kholinar. She knew, without needing to check the calendar on her desk, what day it was. Her books were out, and she was working on an essay about the Parshendi, recently discovered on the Shattered Plains.

She wanted to remain logical, but … this room brought up so many memories. Kholinar, now lost to them, the palace controlled by the Fused. This room likely no longer existed. She stood in a beautiful figment of her past.

She walked to the bookshelf and ran her fingers over Light and Gemstones by Chanosha, then the six-volume Artifabrication by Britt the Good. Navani’s copies had been worn when she acquired them, as these were old books with faded pages and cracking covers, purchased by a young Navani during the years when she’d first started spending time with Gavilar, Dalinar, Torol, and Ialai. Days when they’d dreamed of conquering the world, and she’d dreamed of conquering herself.

There, in a spot along her shelf of knickknacks, she found a wooden … something … made by Elhokar when he’d gotten his first whittling knife as a boy. He’d called it a skyeel, she thought. He’d been embarrassed, years later, that she’d kept it. Yet she smiled whenever she saw it, and the small scrapbook of poems and stories written by Jasnah during her youth, when she’d been determined to learn how to write those fun adventure tales that women liked to read. Those embarrassed Jasnah more than the wooden skyeel had Elhokar, and Navani had been sensitive enough to hide them. She had been made to feel ashamed of her scholarship; she would not do the same to her daughter.

Odd, Navani thought, trailing through the room. Each time, the vision lets me settle in for a moment before hitting me with the painful part. Like it wants me to experience joy, before smashing it.

It seemed so deliberate. She was able to guess, almost to the second, when she would first hear Gavilar’s footsteps in the hall. She turned, completely unsurprised when he burst through the door and slammed it shut.

Seeing him hurt. From the outside, he was exactly the man she’d always wished to marry. A regal king, like from the olden days. Any historian could have warned her those kings from the olden days had almost universally been vile human beings.

“Did you tell Elhokar,” he demanded, his eyes seething, “that he shouldn’t marry Aesudan?”

“So I was right,” she said. “It’s that argument.”

“How dare you? We need this union; you know how I’ve worked for it. Elhokar would have married that nobody scribe, if not for me. ” He didn’t raise his voice, but lowered it, exuding a sense of dangerous control.

“I wonder,” Navani said. “Was I too hard on Aesudan? I remember undercutting her time and time again. I didn’t like the girl, but did I need to insult her?”

Gavilar strode around the desk to come right up next to her. “You undermine my authority.”

“I assert my authority.”

“You will make me look bad before the highprinces.”

“I learned long ago, Gavilar,” she said, “queen or not, I can’t make you into anything. If you look bad before anyone, it’s merely because I’ve pulled the curtains back.”

He growled, then raised his hand.

“Ah,” she said. “But he never hit me. If he does now, it will break the illusion, won’t it?”

He huffed, then spun, turning away from her.

Her heart was racing—that slap had looked like it would really fall. But then … had she just manifested control over this vision? She hadn’t been able to draw herself into a pleasant vision despite trying, but maybe that was too big an alteration—perhaps she needed to try smaller things. Like … like guiding an ornery chull. Stopping it was near impossible. But you could turn it. How to test her theory?

“Yes, he can’t hit me,” she whispered. “Physical pain would have bolstered me, provoked me to leave and escape his control. What he did was in some ways worse. He undermined my confidence …”

Gavilar spun back toward her. “You think,” he said, “you belong at my side? You think you deserve to be a queen?”

“Yes,” she said. “Like that.”

“I build something grand,” Gavilar said, stalking toward her, “and you’re still stuck—at least in your mind—on a backwater ranch, barely able to write your name.”

“He didn’t know that about me,” she added. “By the time I knew him, I had impressive penmanship and spelling.”

“I build something grand,” Gavilar said, stalking toward her again, like an actor repeating his lines after flubbing them, “and you’re still stuck—in your mind—on a backwater ranch, worrying about your insignificant father and his petty concerns.”

“Much better,” Navani said. “But Gavilar always built up to insults like these—he never came in spewing them. You’re missing the nuance. The careful gibes like pins—not daggers. The cold refusal to talk to me about important matters, as if insulting me wasn’t even worth his time. Gavilar was a master of precision abuse.”

The simulacrum of Gavilar started pacing on the other side of the room. She could steer this vision. Almost like … whatever was sending these had its attention mostly elsewhere, and had left this one to play out and torment her. Like Dalinar’s visions of the past, which had instructions on what to show him, but no direct oversight.

Or was she reading too much into this? Either way, she had tested her theory. The next step was application. Could she use these visions to get information that would help Dalinar?

No, she thought. I need to find Gav first. Somewhere in here is a boy, terrified and alone.

Where would little Gavinor be?

The answer was obvious. If the poor child was in a vision like this, it would be the one where he was tortured by evil spren while his mother hummed to herself.

Wait.

That had happened in the Kholinar palace.

A different version of it, yes, but if Navani could steer this particular chull … could she find her grandson? Gavilar started talking again, but Navani ignored him. He was unworthy of her attention, and always had been.

What if … she thought. Storms. That would hurt. Could she do it?

Strength before weakness. She’d said the words. She needed to mean them.

“You know what would really hurt me?” she whispered. “If I was forced to watch what happened … what happened to Elhokar … at the end.”

Each word was raw, because they were true.

That truth served her—because she was certain the vision could sense her sincerity. In a blink, Gavilar’s simulacrum puffed away, and the room changed, dust appearing on the books. This was the palace that Aesudan had ruled under the thrall of multiple Unmade.

Navani opened the door, and heard shouts echoing in the hall. She’d done it. This was the terrible day when her son had been killed.