Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

“What!” Ellista exclaimed, reading. “No, you silly girl! He’s finally pronounced his affection for you. Don’t you dare turn away now.”

How could she accept this wanton justification of her once single-minded desires? Should she not, instead, select the more prudent choice, as advocated by the undeviating will of her uncle? Brightlord Vadam had an endowment of land upon the highprince’s grace, and would have means to provide far beyond the satisfactions available to a simple officer, no matter how well regarded or what winds had graced his temperament, features, and gentle touch.

Ellista gasped. “Brightlord Vadam? You little whore! Have you forgotten how he locked away your father?”

“Wema,” Brightlord Sterling intoned, “it seems I have gravely misjudged your attentions. In this, I find myself deposited deep within an embarrassment of folly. I shall be away, to the Shattered Plains, and you shall not again suffer the torment of my presence.”

He bowed a true gentleman’s bow, possessed of all proper refinement and deference. It was a supplication beyond what even a monarch could rightly demand, and in it Wema ascertained the true nature of Brightlord Sterling’s regard. Simple, yet passionate. Respectful in deed. It lent great context to his earlier advance, which now appeared all at once to be a righteous division in otherwise sure armor, a window of vulnerability, rather than a model of avarice.

As he lifted the door’s latch to forever make his exodus from her life, Wema surged with unrivaled shame and longing, twisted together not unlike two threads winding in a loom to construct a grand tapestry of desire.

“Wait!” Wema cried. “Dear Sterling, wait upon my words.”

“Storms right you’d better wait, Sterling.” Ellista leaned closer to the book, flipping the page.

Decorum seemed a vain thing to her now, lost upon the sea that was her need to feel Sterling’s touch. She rushed to him, and upon his arm pressed her ensleeved hand, which then she lifted to caress his sturdy jaw.

It was so warm out here in the forest. Practically sweltering. Ellista put her hand to her lips, reading with wide eyes, trembling.

Would that the window through that statuesque armor could still be located, and that a similar wound within herself might be found, to press against his own and offer passage deep within her soul. If only—

“Ellista?” a voice asked.

“Yip!” she said, bolting upright, snapping the book closed, and spun toward the sound. “Um. Oh! Ardent Urv.” The young Siln ardent was tall, gangly, and obnoxiously loud at times. Except, apparently, when sneaking up on colleagues in the forest.

“What was that you were studying?” he asked.

“Important works,” Ellista said, then sat on the book. “Nothing to mind yourself with. What is it you want?”

“Um…” He looked down at her satchel. “You were the last one to check out the transcriptions from Bendthel’s collected Dawnchant? The old versions? I just wanted to check on your progress.”

Dawnchant. Right. They’d been working on that before this storm came, and everyone got distracted. Old Navani Kholin, in Alethkar, had somehow cracked the Dawnchant. Her story about visions was nonsense—the Kholin family was known for opaque politics—but her key was authentic, and had let them slowly work through the old texts.

Ellista started digging in her satchel. She came up with three musty codices and a sheaf of papers, the latter being the work she’d done so far.

Annoyingly, Urv settled on the ground beside her stump, taking the papers as she offered them. He laid his satchel across his lap and began reading.

“Incredible,” he said a few moments later. “You’ve made more progress than I have.”

“Everyone else is too busy worrying about that storm.”

“Well, it is threatening to wipe out civilization.”

“An overreaction. Everyone always overreacts to every little gust of wind.”

He flipped through her pages. “What’s this section? Why take such care for where each text was found? Fiksin concluded that these Dawnchant books had all spread from a central location, and so there’s nothing to learn by where they ended up.”

“Fiksin was a boot-licker, not a scholar,” Ellista said. “Look, there’s easy proof here that the same writing system was once used all across Roshar. I have references in Makabakam, Sela Tales, Alethela … Not a diaspora of texts, but real evidence they wrote naturally in the Dawnchant.”

“Do you suppose they all spoke the same language?”

“Hardly.”

“But Jasnah Kholin’s Relic and Monument?”

“Doesn’t claim everyone spoke the same language, only that they wrote it. It’s foolish to assume that everyone used the same language across hundreds of years and dozens of nations. It makes more sense that there was a codified written language, the language of scholarship, just like you’ll find many undertexts written in Alethi now.”

“Ah…” he said. “And then a Desolation hit.…”

Ellista nodded, showing him a later page in her sheaf of notes. “This in-between, weird language is where people started using the Dawnchant script to phonetically transcribe their language. It didn’t work so well.” She flipped two more pages. “In this scrap we have one of the earliest emergences of the proto-Thaylo-Vorin glyphic radicals, and here is one showing a more intermediate Thaylen form.

“We’ve always wondered what happened to the Dawnchant. How could people forget how to read their own language? Well, it seems clear now. By the point this happened, the language had been moribund for millennia. They weren’t speaking it, and hadn’t been for generations.”

“Brilliant,” Urv said. He wasn’t so bad, for a Siln. “I’ve been translating what I can, but got stuck on the Covad Fragment. If what you’ve been doing here is correct, it might be because Covad isn’t true Dawnchant, but a phonetic transcription of another ancient language.…”

He glanced to the side, then cocked his head. Was he looking at her—

Oh, no. It was just the book, which she was still sitting on.

“An Accountability of Virtue.” He grunted. “Good book.”

“You’ve read it?”

“I have a fondness for Alethi epics,” he said absently, flipping through her pages. “She really should have picked Vadam though. Sterling was a flatterer and a cadger.”

“Sterling is a noble and upright officer!” She narrowed her eyes. “And you are just trying to get a rise out of me, Ardent Urv.”

“Maybe.” He flipped through her pages, studying a diagram she’d made of various Dawnchant grammars. “I have a copy of the sequel.”

“There’s a sequel?”

“About her sister.”

“The mousy one?”

“She is elevated to courtly attention and has to choose between a strapping naval officer, a Thaylen banker, and the King’s Wit.”

“Wait. There are three different men this time?”

“Sequels always have to be bigger,” he said, then offered her the stack of pages back. “I’ll lend it to you.”

“Oh you will, will you? And what is the cost for this magnanimous gesture, Brightlord Urv?”