The Way of Kings

They locked expressions. Adolin didn’t look away. He wouldn’t look away.

Dalinar finally turned from him. “Leave me, please.”

“All right. Fine. But I want you to think about this. I want you to–”

“Adolin. Go.”

Adolin gritted his teeth, but turned and stalked away. It needed to be said, he told himself as he left the gallery.

That didn’t make him feel any less sick about having to be the one who said it.

25 The Butcher

SEVEN YEARS AGO

“It ain’t right, what they do,” the woman’s voice said. “You ain’t supposed to cut into folks, peering in to see what the Almighty placed hidden for good reason.”

Kal froze, standing in an alleyway between two houses in Hearthstone. The sky was wan overhead; winter had come for a time. The Weeping was near, and highstorms were infrequent. For now, it was too cold for plants to enjoy the respite; rockbuds spent winter weeks curled up inside their shells. Most creatures hibernated, waiting for warmth to return. Fortunately, seasons generally lasted only a few weeks. Unpredictability. That was the way of the world. Only after death was there stability. So the ardents taught, at least.

Kal wore a thick, padded coat of breachtree cotton. The material was scratchy but warm, and had been dyed a deep brown. He kept the hood up, his hands in his pockets. To his right sat the baker’s place – the family slept in the triangular crawlspace in back, and the front was their store. To Kal’s left was one of Hearthstone’s taverns, where lavis ale and mudbeer flowed in abundance during winter weeks.

He could hear two women, unseen but chatting a short distance way.

“You know that he stole from the old citylord,” one woman’s voice said, keeping her voice down. “An entire goblet full of spheres. The surgeon says they were a gift, but he was the only one there when the citylord died.”

“There is a document, I hear,” the first voice said.

“A few glyphs. Not a proper will. And whose hand wrote those glyphs? The surgeon himself. It ain’t right, the citylord not having a woman there to be scribe. I’m telling you. It ain’t right what they do.”

Kal gritted his teeth, tempted to step out and let the women see that he’d heard them. His father wouldn’t approve, though. Lirin wouldn’t want to cause strife or embarrassment.

But that was his father. So Kal marched right out of the alleyway, passing Nanha Terith and Nanha Relina standing and gossiping in front of the bakery. Terith was the baker’s wife, a fat woman with curly dark hair. She was in the middle of another calumny. Kal gave her a sharp look, and her brown eyes showed a satisfying moment of discomfiture.

Kal crossed the square carefully, wary of patches of ice. The door to the bakery slammed shut behind him, the two women fleeing inside.

His satisfaction didn’t last long. Why did people always say such things about his father? They called him morbid and unnatural, but would scurry out to buy glyphwards and charms from a passing apothecary or luck-merch. The Almighty pity a man who actually did something useful to help!

Still stewing, Kal turned a few corners, walking to where his mother stood on a stepladder at the side of the town hall, carefully chipping at the eaves of the building. Hesina was a tall woman, and she usually kept her hair pulled back into a tail, then wrapped a kerchief around her head. Today, she wore a knit hat over that. She had a long brown coat that matched Kal’s, and the blue hem of her skirt just barely peeked out at the bottom.

The objects of her attention were a set of icicle-like pendants of rock that had formed on the edges of the roof. Highstorms dropped stormwater, and stormwater carried crem. If left alone, crem eventually hardened into stone. Buildings grew stalactites, formed by stormwater slowly dripping from the eaves. You had to clean them off regularly, or risk weighing down the roof so much that it collapsed.

She noticed him and smiled, her cheeks flushed from the cold. With a narrow face, a bold chin, and full lips, she was a pretty woman. At least Kal thought so. Prettier than the baker’s wife, for sure.

“Your father dismissed you from your lessons already?” she asked.

“Everyone hates Father,” Kal blurted out.

His mother turned back to her work. “Kaladin, you’re thirteen. You’re old enough to know not to say foolish things like that.”

“It’s true,” he said stubbornly. “I heard some women talking, just now. They said that Father stole the spheres from Brightlord Wistiow. They say that Father enjoys slicing people open and doing things that ain’t natural.”

“Aren’t natural.”

“Why can’t I speak like everyone else?”

“Because it isn’t proper.”

“It’s proper enough for Nanha Terith.”

“And what do you think of her?”

Kal hesitated. “She’s ignorant. And she likes to gossip about things she doesn’t know anything about.”

“Well, then. If you wish to emulate her, I can obviously find no objection to the practice.”