“Mashala,” he pled in his quiet voice. “Please. What have you heard?”
“Sadeas’s army returned without your father’s army,” Navani said. “There is talk of a rout, though it doesn’t look as if these men have been through one.” She glared at Sadeas, giving serious contemplation to throwing a fit. Fortunately, he finally spoke with the soldier and then sent him back.
“You may approach, Brightness,” the man said, bowing to her.
“About time,” she growled, shoving past and passing underneath the canopy. Renarin joined her, walking more hesitantly.
“Brightness Navani,” Sadeas said, clasping his hands behind his back, imposing in his crimson Plate. “I had hoped to bring you the news at your son’s palace. I suppose that a disaster like this is too large to contain. I express my condolences at the loss of your brother.”
Renarin gasped softly.
Navani steeled herself, folding her arms, trying to quiet the screams of denial and pain that came from the back of her mind. This was a pattern. She often saw patterns in things. In this case, the pattern was that she could never possess anything of value for long. It was always snatched from her just when it began to look promising.
Quiet, she scolded herself. “You will explain,” she said to Sadeas, meeting his gaze. She’d practiced that look over the decades, and was pleased to see that it discomfited him.
“I’m sorry, Brightness,” Sadeas repeated, stammering. “The Parshendi overwhelmed your brother’s army. It was folly to work together. Our change in tactics was so threatening to the savages that they brought every soldier they could to this battle, surrounding us.”
“And so you left Dalinar?”
“We fought hard to reach him, but the numbers were simply overpowering. We had to retreat lest we lose ourselves as well! I would have continued fighting, save for the fact that I saw your brother fall with my own eyes, swarmed by Parshendi with hammers.” He grimaced. “They began carrying away chunks of bloodied Shardplate as prizes. Barbaric monsters.”
Navani felt cold. Cold, numb. How could this happen? After finally – finally – making that stone-headed man see her as a woman, rather than as a sister. And now…
And now…
She set her jaw against the tears. “I don’t believe it.”
“I understand that the news is difficult.” Sadeas waved for an attendant to fetch her a chair. “I wish I had not been forced to bring it to you. Dalinar and I… well, I have known him for many years, and while we did not always see the same sunrise, I considered him an ally. And a friend.” He cursed softly, looking eastward. “They will pay for this. I will see that they pay.”
He seemed so earnest that Navani found herself wavering. Poor Renarin, pale-faced and wide-eyed, seemed stunned beyond the means to speak. When the chair arrived, Navani refused it, so Renarin sat, earning a glance of disapproval from Sadeas. Renarin grasped his head in his hands, staring at the ground. He was trembling.
He’s highprince now, Navani realized.
No. No. He was only highprince if she accepted the idea that Dalinar was dead. And he wasn’t. He couldn’t be.
Sadeas had all of the bridges, she thought, looking down at the lumberyard.
Navani stepped out into the late-afternoon sunlight, feeling its heat on her skin. She walked up to her attendants. “Brushpen,” she said to Makal, who carried a satchel with Navani’s possessions. “The thickest one. And my burn ink.”
The short, plump woman opened the satchel, taking out a long brushpen with a knob of hog bristles on the end as wide as a man’s thumb. Navani took it. The ink followed.
Around her, the guards stared as Navani took the pen and dipped it into the blood-colored ink. She knelt, and began to paint on the stone ground.
Art was about creation. That was its soul, its essence. Creation and order. You took something disorganized – a splash of ink, an empty page – and you built something from it. Something from nothing. The soul of creation.
She felt the tears on her cheeks as she painted. Dalinar had no wife and no daughters; he had nobody to pray for him. And so, Navani painted a prayer onto the stones themselves, sending her attendants for more ink. She paced off the size of the glyph as she continued its border, making it enormous, spreading her ink onto the tan rocks.
Soldiers gathered around, Sadeas stepping from his canopy, watching her paint, her back to the sun as she crawled on the ground and furiously dipped her brushpen into the ink jars. What was a prayer, if not creation? Making something where nothing existed. Creating a wish out of despair, a plea out of anguish. Bowing one’s back before the Almighty, and forming humility from the empty pride of a human life.
Something from nothing. True creation.
Her tears mixed with the ink. She went through four jars. She crawled, holding her safehand to the ground, brushing the stones and smearing ink on her cheeks when she wiped the tears. When she finally finished, she knelt back on her knees before a glyph twenty paces long, emblazoned as if in blood. The wet ink reflected sunlight, and she fired it with a candle; the ink was made to burn whether wet or dry. The flames burned across the length of the prayer, killing it and sending its soul to the Almighty.
She bowed her head before the prayer. It was only a single character, but a complex one. Thath. Justice.
Men watched quietly, as if afraid of spoiling her solemn wish. A cold breeze began blowing, whipping at pennants and cloaks. The prayer went out, but that was fine. It wasn’t meant to burn long.
“Brightlord Sadeas!” an anxious voice called.
Navani looked up. Soldiers parted, making way for a runner in green. He hurried up to Sadeas, beginning to speak, but the highprince grabbed the man by the shoulder in a Shardplate grip and pointed, gesturing for his guards to make a perimeter. He pulled the messenger beneath the canopy.
Navani continued to kneel beside her prayer. The flames left a black scar in the shape of the glyph on the ground. Someone stepped up beside her – Renarin. He went to one knee, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, Mashala.”
She nodded, standing, her freehand sprinkled with drops of red pigment. Her cheeks were still wet with tears, but she narrowed her eyes, looking through the press of soldiers toward Sadeas. His expression was thunderous, face growing red, eyes wide with anger.
She turned and pushed her way through the press of soldiers, scrambling up to the rim of the staging field. Renarin and some of Sadeas’s officers joined her in staring out over the Shattered Plains.
And there they saw a creeping line of men limping back toward the warcamps, led by a mounted man in slate-grey armor.
Dalinar rode Gallant at the head of two thousand six hundred and fifty-three men. That was all that remained of his assault force of eight thousand.
The long trek back across the plateaus had given him time to think. His insides were still a tempest of emotions. He flexed his left hand as he rode; it was now encased by a blue-painted Shardplate gauntlet borrowed from Adolin. It would take days to regrow Dalinar’s own gauntlet. Longer, if the Parshendi tried to grow a full suit from the one he had left. They would fail, so long as Dalinar’s armorers fed Stormlight to his suit. The abandoned gauntlet would degrade and crumble to dust, a new one growing for Dalinar.
For now, he wore Adolin’s. They had collected all of the infused gemstones among his twenty-six hundred men and used that Stormlight to recharge and reinforce his armor. It was still scarred with cracks. Healing as much damage as it had sustained would take days, but the Plate was in fighting shape again, if it came to that.