Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

She ushered them in and quickly shut the door. Kaladin blinked at the sphere-lit chamber, its walls lined with bolts of cloth and dummies with half-finished coats on them.

“What is this place?” Kaladin asked.

“Well, I figured we’d want someplace safe,” Adolin said. “We’d need to stay with someone I’d trust with my life, or more.” He looked at Kaladin, then gestured toward the woman. “So I brought us to my tailor.”

I wish to submit my formal protest at the idea of abandoning the tower. This is an extreme step, taken brashly.

—From drawer 2-22, smokestone

Secrets.

This city was brimming with them. It was stuffed with them, so tightly they couldn’t help but ooze out.

The only thing for Shallan to do, then, was punch herself in the face.

That was harder than it seemed. She always flinched. Come on, she thought, making a fist. With eyes squeezed shut, she braced herself, then smacked her freehand into the side of her head.

It barely hurt; she simply wasn’t capable of hitting herself hard enough. Maybe she could get Adolin to do it for her. He was in the back workroom of the tailor’s shop. Shallan had excused herself to step into the front showroom, as she figured the others would react poorly to her trying to actively attract a painspren.

She could hear their voices as they interrogated the polite tailor. “It started with the riots, Your Majesty,” the woman said in response to a question from Elhokar. “Or maybe before, with the … Well, it’s complicated. Oh, I can’t believe that you’re here. I’ve had Passion for something to happen, true, but to finally … I mean…”

“Take a deep breath, Yokska,” Adolin said gently. Even his voice was adorable. “Once you’ve taken all this in, we can continue.”

Secrets, Shallan thought. Secrets caused all of this.

Shallan peeked into the other room. The king, Adolin, Yokska the tailor, and Kaladin sat inside, all wearing their own faces again. They’d sent Kaladin’s men—along with Red, Ishnah, and Vathah—off with the tailor’s housemaid to prepare the upper rooms and attic to accommodate guests.

Yokska and her husband would be sleeping on pallets in the back room here; naturally, Elhokar had been given their room. Right now, the small group had arranged a circle of wooden chairs under the heedless watch of tailor’s dummies wearing a variety of half-finished coats.

Similar finished coats were displayed around the showroom. They were made in bright colors—even brighter than the Alethi wore at the Shattered Plains—with gold or silver thread, shiny buttons, and elaborate embroidery on the large pockets. The coats didn’t close at the front except for a few buttons right below the collar, while the sides flared out, then split into tails at the back.

“It was the execution of the ardent, Brightlord,” Yokska said. “The queen had her hanged, and … Oh! It was so gruesome. Blessed Passion, Your Majesty. I don’t want to speak ill of your wife! She must not have realized—”

“Just tell us,” Elhokar said. “Do not fear reprisal. I must know what the city’s people think.”

Yokska trembled. She was a small, plump woman who wore her long Thaylen eyebrows curled in twin ringlets, and was probably very fashionable in that skirt and blouse. Shallan lingered in the doorway, curious as to what the tailor had to say.

“Well,” Yokska continued, “during the riots, the queen … the queen basically vanished. We’d get proclamations from her, now and then, but they often didn’t make much sense. It all went wrong at the ardent’s death. The city was already in an uproar.… She wrote such awful things, Your Majesty. About the state of the monarchy, and the queen’s faith and…”

“And Aesudan condemned her to death,” Elhokar said. Lit by only a few spheres at the center of their circle, his face was half shadowed. It was a most intriguing effect, and Shallan took a Memory for later sketching.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“It was the dark spren, obviously, who gave the actual order,” Elhokar said. “The dark spren that is controlling the palace. My wife would never be so imprudent as to publicly execute an ardent during such parlous times.”

“Oh! Yes, of course. Dark spren. In the palace.” Yokska sounded relieved to have a rationale for not blaming the queen.

Shallan considered, then noticed a pair of fabric scissors on a ledge nearby. She snatched them, then ducked back into the showroom. She pulled her skirt to the side, then stabbed herself in the leg with the scissors.

The sharp pain seared up her leg and through her body.

“Mmmm,” Pattern said. “Destruction. This … this is not normal for you, Shallan. Too far.”

She trembled at the pain. Blood welled from the wound, but she pressed her hand against it to limit its spread.

There! That had done it. Painspren appeared around her, as if crawling out of the ground—like little disembodied hands. They looked skinless, made of sinew. Normally they were bright orange, but these were a sickly green. And they were also wrong … instead of human hands, these seemed to be from some kind of monster—too distorted, with claws jutting from the sinew.

Shallan eagerly took a Memory, still holding her havah skirt up to keep it from the blood.

“Does that not hurt?” Pattern asked, from where he’d moved onto the wall.

“Of course it does,” Shallan said, her eyes watering. “That was the point.”

“Mmmm…” He buzzed, worried, but he needn’t have been, as Shallan had what she wanted. Satisfied, she took in a little Stormlight and healed up, then used some cloth from her satchel to wipe the blood from her leg. She rinsed her hands and the cloth in the washroom basin. She was surprised at the running water; she hadn’t thought Kholinar had such things.

She took out her drawing pad and returned to the back room’s doorway, where she leaned against the jamb, doing a quick sketch of the strange, twisted painspren. Jasnah would tell her to put down her sketchpad and go sit with the others—but Shallan often paid better attention with a sketchpad in her hands. People who didn’t draw never seemed to understand that.

“Tell us about the palace,” Kaladin said. “The … dark spren, as His Majesty put it.”

Yokska nodded. “Oh, yes, Brightlord.”

Shallan glanced up to catch Kaladin’s reaction at being called Brightlord, but he didn’t show one. His illusory disguise was gone—though Shallan had tucked that sketch away, for possible further use. He’d summoned his Blade earlier in the morning, and he now had eyes as blue as any she’d seen. They hadn’t faded yet.

“There was that unexpected highstorm,” Yokska continued. “And after that, the weather went insane. The rains started going in fits and starts. But oh! When that new storm came, the one with the red lightning, it left a gloom over the palace. So nasty! Dark times. I suppose … suppose those haven’t ended.”

“Where were the royal guards?” Elhokar said. “They should have augmented the Watch, restored order during the rioting!”

“The Palace Guard retreated into the palace, Your Majesty,” Yokska said. “And she ordered the City Watch to barricade into the barracks. They eventually moved to the palace on the queen’s orders. They … haven’t been seen since.”