"Because of what you've seen," Adolin said, growing frustrated. "Father, you said you'd listen to what I had to say about the visions. Well, please listen now."

"This isn't the proper place."

"You always have an excuse," Adolin said. "I've tried to approach you about it five times now, and you always rebuff me!"

"Perhaps it's because I know what you'll say," Dalinar said. "And I know it won't do any good."

"Or perhaps it's because you don't want to be confronted by the truth."

"That's enough, Adolin."

"No, no it's not! We're mocked in every one of the warcamps, our authority and reputation diminishes by the day, and you refuse to do anything substantial about it!"

"Adolin. I will not take this from my son."

"But you'll take it from everyone else? Why is that, Father? When others say things about us, you let them. But when Renarin or I take the smallest step toward what you view as being inappropriate, we're immediately chastised! Everyone else can speak lies, but I can't speak the truth? Do your sons mean so little to you?"

Dalinar froze, looking as if he'd been slapped.

"You aren't well, Father," Adolin continued. Part of him realized that he had gone too far, that he was speaking too loudly, but it boiled out anyway. "We need to stop tiptoeing around it! You need to stop making up increasingly irrational explanations to reason away your lapses! I know it's hard to accept, but sometimes, people get old. Sometimes, the mind stops working right.

"I don't know what's wrong. Maybe it's your guilt over Gavilar's death. That book, the Codes, the visions-maybe they're all attempts to find escape, find redemption, something. What you see is not real. Your life now is a rationalization, a way of trying to pretend that what's happening isn't happening. But I'll go to Damnation itself before I'll let you drag the entire house down without speaking my mind on it!"

He practically shouted those last words. They echoed in the large chamber, and Adolin realized he was shaking. He had never, in all his years of life, spoken to his father in such a way.

"You think I haven't wondered these things?" Dalinar said, his voice cold, his eyes hard. "I've gone through each point you've made a dozen times over."

"Then maybe you should go over them a few more."

"I must trust myself. The visions are trying to show me something important. I cannot prove it or explain how I know. But it's true."

"Of course you think that," Adolin said, exasperated. "Don't you see? That's exactly what you would feel. Men are very good at seeing what they want to! Look at the king. He sees a killer in every shadow, and a worn strap becomes a convoluted plot to take his life."

Dalinar fell silent again.

"Sometimes, the simple answers are the right ones, Father!" Adolin said. "The king's strap just wore out. And you…you're seeing things that aren't there. I'm sorry."

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.

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."