Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

“What?” Navani asked him.

“It’s, it’s like…”

Him. The assassin, who had—according to both Adolin and Dalinar—somehow manipulated gravityspren.

Navani looked to the scholars. “Why don’t you all go down and have them lower the platform? You can inspect the gemstones and see if any broke.”

The others heard it as a dismissal and went down the steps in an excited bunch, though Rushu—dear Rushu—remained. “Oh!” the woman said. “It would be better to watch from up here, in case—”

“I will speak with my nephew. Alone, please.” Sometimes, working with scholars, you had to be a touch blunt.

Rushu finally blushed, then bobbed a bow and hastened away. Adolin stepped up to the railing. It was difficult to not feel dwarfed by a man wearing Plate, and when he reached out to hold the railing, she thought she could hear the wood groan from the strength of that grip. He could have snapped that rail without a second thought.

I will figure out how to make more of that, she thought. While she was no warrior, there might be things she could do to protect her family. The more she understood the secrets of technology and the power of spren locked within gemstones, the closer she grew to finding what she sought.

Adolin was staring at her hand. Oh, so he’d finally noticed that, had he?

“Aunt?” he said, voice strained. “A glove?”

“Far more practical,” she said, holding up her safehand and wiggling the fingers. “Oh, don’t look like that. Darkeyed women do it all the time.”

“You’re not darkeyed.”

“I’m the dowager queen,” Navani said. “Nobody cares what in Damnation I do. I could prance around completely nude, and they’d all just shake their heads and talk about how eccentric I am.”

Adolin sighed, but let the matter drop, instead nodding toward the platform. “How did you do it?”

“Conjoined fabrials,” Navani said. “The trick was finding a way to overcome the structural weaknesses of the gemstones, which succumb easily to the multiplied strain of simultaneous infusion drain and physical stress. We…”

She trailed off as she caught Adolin’s eyes glazing over. He was a bright young man when it came to most social interactions, but he didn’t have a single scholarly breath in him. Navani smiled, switching to layman’s terms.

“If you split a fabrial gemstone in a certain way,” Navani said, “you can link the two pieces together so they mimic each other’s motions. Like a spanreed?”

“Ah, right,” Adolin said.

“Well,” Navani said, “we can also make two halves that move opposite one another. We filled the floor of that parapet with such gemstones and put their other halves in the wooden square. Once we engage them all—so they are mimicking one another in reverse—we can pull one platform down and make the other go up.”

“Huh,” Adolin said. “Can you make this work on a battlefield?”

That was, of course, the exact thing Dalinar had asked when she’d shown him the concepts. “Proximity is a problem right now,” she said. “The farther the pairs grow from one another, the weaker their interaction, and that causes them to crack more easily. You don’t see it with something light like a spanreed, but when working with heavy weights… Well, we can probably get them working on the Shattered Plains. That’s our goal right now. You could roll one of these out there, then engage it and write back to us via reed. We pull the platform here down, and your archers get raised up fifty feet to gain a perfect archery position.”

This, finally, seemed to get Adolin excited. “The enemy wouldn’t be able to topple it or climb it! Stormfather. The tactical advantage!”

“Exactly.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“I am, dear,” Navani said. “But this isn’t the most ambitious idea we’ve had for this technique. Not by a faint breeze or a stormwind.”

He frowned at her.

“It’s all very technical and theoretical right now,” Navani said, smiling. “But just wait. When you see the things the ardents are imagining—”

“Not you?” Adolin asked.

“I’m their patron, dear,” Navani said, patting him on the arm. “I don’t have time to make all of the diagrams and figures, even were I up to the task.” She looked down at the gathered ardents and women scientists who were inspecting the floor of the parapet platform. “They suffer me.”

“Surely it’s more than that.”

Perhaps in another life it could have been. She was sure some of them saw her as a colleague. Many, however, just saw her as the woman who sponsored them so she’d have new fabrials to show off at parties. Perhaps she was just that. A lighteyed lady of rank had to have some hobbies, didn’t she?

“I assume you’re here to escort me to the meeting?” The highprinces, abuzz about the assassin’s attack, had demanded that Elhokar meet with them today.

Adolin nodded, twitching and glancing over his shoulder as he heard a noise, instinctively stepping protectively to put himself between Navani and whatever it was. The noise, however, was just some workers taking the side off one of Dalinar’s massive rolling bridges. Those were the main purpose of these grounds; she’d merely appropriated the area for her test.

She held her arm out to him. “You’re as bad as your father.”

“Perhaps I am,” he said, taking her arm. That Plated hand of his might have made some women uncomfortable, but she’d been around Plate far, far more often than most.

They started down the wide steps together. “Aunt,” he said. “Have you been, uh, doing anything to encourage my father’s advances? Between you two, I mean.” For a boy who spent half his life flirting with anything in a dress, he certainly did blush a lot when he said that.

“Encourage him?” Navani said. “I did more than that, child. I practically had to seduce the man. Your father is certainly stubborn.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Adolin said dryly. “You realize how much more difficult you’ve made his position? He’s trying to force the other highprinces to follow the Codes using the social constraints of honor, yet he’s pointedly ignoring something similar.”

“A bothersome tradition.”

“You seem content to ignore only the ones you find bothersome, while expecting us to follow all the others.”

“Of course,” Navani said, smiling. “You haven’t figured that out before now?”

Adolin’s expression grew grim.

“Don’t sulk,” Navani said. “You’re free from the causal for now, as Jasnah has apparently decided to gallivant off someplace. I won’t have the chance to marry you off quite yet, at least not until she reappears.” Knowing her, that could be tomorrow—or it could be months from now.

“I’m not sulking,” Adolin said.

“Of course you aren’t,” she said, patting his armored arm as they reached the bottom of the steps. “Let’s get to the palace. I don’t know if your father will be able to delay the meeting for us if we’re tardy.”