Welcome, Sanderfans and Cosmere Chickens, to another Wind and Truth read-along discussion. Last week we saw a whole lot happening in Chapters 16, 17, and 18, and we’ve enjoyed following your discussion on those chapters. Check out the social media section at the end of the article to see if we spotlighted one of your comments! This week, we check out what’s going on in Chapters 19 and 20.
Note that this post will possibly contain full Cosmere spoilers, so beware if you aren’t caught up on all Cosmere content. And please remember, when posting or commenting about these preview chapters on social media, to follow your platform’s spoiler rules. Your comments here, however, don’t need to be spoiler tagged, so feel free to comment as you will down below!
Without further ado, let’s get to the discussion!
Paige’s Summary and Commentary
Chapter 19 is titled “Ruled by Voices.” The epigraph is slowly revealing more info about where the family came from, before their encounter with Nohadon.
As you might guess from the title of the chapter, we’re following Szeth’s point of view. Our reformed assassin in white still hears the voices of all he’s killed. He’s flying with Kaladin to Shinovar and when they arrive, he becomes emotional to find himself standing on Shin land once again, looking out over the soil and dandelions. It’s quite a touching moment.
Then his snooty spren ruins it. The highspren, who won’t even tell Szeth his name or grant him access to the surge of Division, despite having spoken his Third Ideal. I have a great distaste for Szeth’s spren—especially when he chastises Szeth as if he were a child. Lyndsey and I are on the same page regarding our outright dislike of this spren. See her commentary for more on the aforementioned chastisement.
When Kaladin asks Szeth if he’s alright, Nightblood answers. Honor love that sword.
Oh, I’m fine! said the sword strapped to Szeth’s back. Thank you. Nobody has been paying attention to me today, but I’m famously patient. It comes from being a sword.
Kaladin is confused by the dandelions and how they don’t pull away. He almost stomps on the dandelion, just trying to see if it will withdraw; watching him, Szeth calls him a coward for not crushing the weed. Rude. Szeth suppresses amusement by Kaladin’s assumption that they’ll find “real plants” that will retract. His spren wouldn’t approve of such emotion. I think this is why I don’t like Skybreakers, other than the whole “betraying humanity” thing… they’re so stoic.
All told, a relatively short chapter. But Chapter 20 is longer, never fear! This chapter is titled “Three Vital Points of Defense” and takes us back to Dalinar’s meeting of the monarchs for a Navani POV.
Of course, last week we saw Wit come to the realization that Rayse no longer holds Odium’s shard. Navani hears the Sibling asking the Stormfather if it’s possible (she has heard the Stormfather in her mind before, but only twice). The Stormfather goes to look, then comes back and confirms that it’s true, Rayse is dead and another holds the Shard. But nobody seems to think about whether it’s someone they know. Think, people, think! At this point, as Lyndsey discusses below, the Stormfather almost seems regretful that Rayse is dead, but then… nope. He just wishes he’d killed Rayse himself. Vicious!
Queen Fen doesn’t care that the vessel has changed, saying it makes no difference, but Wit stresses how much it does matter. Then he admits that he’s frightened. I know you just read the chapter but I need to highlight it, because what Wit says about the new vessel is quite unsettling:
“I knew the old Odium,” he said, spinning around to look at them all. “Our entire plan—the contract, the contest—was based in part on that knowledge. Now… I’m frightened. The old Odium was deeply calcified into his position as a god—and was very unlikely to do anything that would risk that position. The new one was likely a mortal before their Ascension. They’ll be more brash, more willing to take risks.”
Because Rayse was held to his word by the contract and, oddly, the new vessel… isn’t bound as strongly by the promises made by his predecessor. Like, say, the “lesser promise” about not exploiting loopholes. Rayse gave his worth that he wouldn’t do so, but the new vessel could, and not face any consequences, it seems. Fen asks if they could call off the contest, since Odium has now changed and isn’t holding to the details of the contract. Wit says that of course they could, but that would allow Odium to retaliate in person. And Kmakl makes a note:
“No breaking contracts with gods.”
Hahaha… hahahahaha. ::ahem::: That wasn’t maniacal laughter at all, how dare you imply such a thing.
Moving on… The frustrating part of the discussion, especially for Fen, is that if the enemy captures the capital city, then they get the whole country. This is why she’s lobbying so vehemently for more troops. Navani suggests changing the capitals to another city but Wit, having already thought of this strategy, shoots her down:
“Here’s the short of it,” Wit said, holding up the written-out version of Dalinar’s agreement with Odium. “This is immutable. This stands. What Odium’s doing plays dirty, but does not break these rules. We could try to do something similar, but changing the capital—or one of a dozen other very clever things I came up with—would put us in violation.”
“And,” Kmakl said, “we shouldn’t violate agreements with gods. I just made a note of it, even.” He gave a wan smile.
Dalinar and Stargyle create a map of Roshar and consider their options. The Sibling is quite impressed and they wonder, in Navani’s mind, how people can now do things the ancient Radiants never did. Navani brags that they’re just all that and a bag of chips.
Not really, but she’s probably thinking it.
There’s much to discuss about the three strongholds that the singers, Skybreakers, and Fused (and Thunderclasts, oh my!) are moving to attack. Of course, Fen and Yanagawn want reinforcements sent to their capital cities, but there just aren’t enough troops to go around. Fen argues that there are forty thousand reinforcements a few days march away from Azimir so she wants Dalinar’s troops sent to protect Thaylen City.
This displeases Yanagawn, understandably, as the city’s Oathgate is smack dab in the middle of the city. It is “protected” by a structure surrounding the platform, however, and Dalinar argues that an enemy force could be held at bay by fewer defenders than at Thaylen City.
There’s concern that if they send out all of their troops again, Urithiru will be open to attack. The Sibling adds their thoughts on that, which I have to include because it’s so cool that they speak out loud, addressing everyone:
“They will not come here. Fused will fall unconscious. Regals will have their forms stripped from them. Even common singers will lose access to their rhythms, and my beats can drive them mad. They know that. Now that I’ve returned, they know.”
With the tower secure, they decide to send twenty thousand troops to Thaylen City, to be led by Jasnah. After a bit more debate and discussion, Dalinar agrees to send Adolin to Azimir with two thousand of their best troops. Then Dalinar tells Sigzil to take the bulk of the Radiants to the Shattered Plains.
As the meeting breaks up, Navani thinks that Dalinar just needs to go hug Adolin. Which he doesn’t, of course. Adolin turns to leave, but then goes back and tells Dalinar and Navani about Shallan and the Ghostbloods. They’re quite put out by the news, of course, but Dalinar grudgingly agrees to provide “authorization for an operation and a Radiant strike force.”
Dalinar remarks on Shallan lying to them and Adolin immediately throws that in his face because, well, Dalinar hasn’t always been truthful, and hid the fact that he killed Evi. Dalinar tells Adolin he raised him to be better than to make gibes and Adolin is like, it’s on! Not really. They don’t hash it out, insisting it’s not the time. Alethi men and their storming refusal to feel feelings and, most especially, to talk about them!
Then Dalinar does something super cool. He gives Adolin a Bondsmithing so that he’ll be able to understand and speak the language in Azir. It will last a few weeks, he says. Super cool! That would be a great tool to be able to bestow on someone else!
Adolin heads off to gather his force, and Dalinar ends the chapter by telling Navani that he ran into a god on the way to the meeting.
So the stage is set, Sanderfans. Troops will be on the move, our parties will separate (Kaladin’s already gone, of course), and we have more fighting coming soon to a chapter near you. What are your thoughts on this week’s chapters? Will Navani ask the Sibling if they sensed their mother’s presence in the tower? Will she question Cultivation’s suggestion that Dalinar should visit the Spiritual Realm? I mean, they only have a matter of days before the contest. What’s going to happen next? Let us know in the comments!
Lyndsey’s Commentary
Chapter 19 has an interesting choice of arch Herald… Chana, (Chanarach), Herald of the Common Man and patron of Dustbringers. Her attributes are Brave/Obedient and her role is Guard. I can’t figure out why she might be here. Any ideas, readers?
Chapter 20 features Jezrien (Jezerezeh), Herald of Kings, patron of the Windrunners and the Wild Card. This tracks for another big war strategy chapter in which we hear from all the leaders of the various nations… and Wit, of course.
A land where the king was a holy man, and was concerned with the plight of the farmer beyond the appropriation of taxes.
I let them pass with two lies.
—From The Way of Kings, fourth parable
Well, this epigraph is just creating more and more questions. Seems like this king is a good man, if he’s genuinely concerned for the lives of his citizens. But two lies?
Now… if you’re anything like me, you may appreciate a visualization of the things being talked about in chapter 20. I spent a bit of time putting together a little strategy map of the things discussed. It’s not perfect (I didn’t have a ton of time, and some of the details in the chapter were a little fuzzy) but it’s pretty close, as near as I can figure.
Szeth
Szeth-son-Honor continued to wear white clothing.
That was no longer mandated. […] …he pretended it was right to continue his routines. If they were wrong—if instead he should have a preference among many tiny options… well, that made him shudder to his core.
Szeth’s lived so long following orders that even small choices terrify him. This poor, traumatized man. Hearing the voices of all those he was ordered to kill, feeling as if they’re condemning him, bearing all that guilt… he’s been through so much.
“This emotion is unfitting of your station,” the spren said, audible and visible only to him. “Do not spoil your dignity with base sentimentality. You serve the law.”
I already hate this spren. While I somewhat understand the sentiment of “the law needs to be impartial and emotion clouds judgment and rationality,” I feel as though there also needs to be a middle ground. Hopefully this is one of many things that Kaladin can help Szeth with.
This is a man, Szeth thought, who pulls back before crushing a weed.
“No wonder you broke and gave up the spear,” Szeth said, “leaving your friends to battle without you. You have grown into a coward, then?”
Wow. Talk about drastically different worldviews. When I first read Szeth’s thought, I thought he was being complimentary. Someone being so kind and gentle that they don’t even want to kill a plant must surely be a good thing, right? But, no. Szeth sees this as a flaw, a weakness. And in some cultures, it may be understandable to view it so. If you’ve spent your whole life fighting for your life against other tribes or against fierce predators, then that very gentleness which, in a peaceful society, would be seen as beneficial, would indeed be a flaw. It could get you killed. We don’t know enough about Szeth’s culture and history to know if this is the case for him… but over the course of this book, we’re going to find out. This is, of course, Szeth’s “flashback book” and we’re going to be getting his backstory.
“Then you should stop talking,” Szeth replied. “Because if you cannot explain what you mean, then why voice silly thoughts?”
Yikes. He’s about as blunt and hard as a boulder. Kaladin’s going to have a lot of work to do teaching this one empathy.
Stormfather
I… will look, said the Stormfather. I must know. Rayse… he can’t just be…
That’s an interesting reaction. Seems awfully personal, as if he knew Rayse before. Maybe he did. After all, the Stormfather’s been around for a long time, presumably. But the way he trails off like that leads me to believe that there’s more to their relationship. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, or it’s a red herring… But then we get this:
Rayse is gone, after all this time.
“You sound regretful,” Navani whispered.
Only that my lightning did not strike his corpse, the Stormfather spat. And my wind did not dash it against stones until it broke.
That’s definitely a very personal reaction. How did they know one another?
I miss how the Stormfather used to be, the Sibling said. He was so much happier before.
Something must have happened to him to instill such rage. But what? The Recreance? Something else that we couldn’t guess at yet?
Dalinar/Adolin
“What?” Dalinar said to her. “He wants little to do with me these days, Navani. It’s best I let him go.”
Navani is right; these two won’t be able to heal the rifts between them without sitting down and having a frank discussion. And both of them are too stubborn to do so.
“You didn’t raise me, Father. You killed the woman who did.”
Oof. When I said they needed to talk, I didn’t mean like that…
“Why?” she asked Dalinar. “Why don’t you say more?”
“He always throws it back at me,” Dalinar said, his thumb and forefinger massaging his forehead. “And in a way, he’s right, Navani. I didn’t raise him.
It’s good that he realizes this, but Navani is more right. Letting it fester is just going to keep poisoning their relationship until it eventually kills it.
Drew’s Commentary: Invested Arts & Theories
At long last, we get a Szeth point of view! It’s still just a start, and he and Kaladin have only just arrived in Shinovar, so many mysteries yet await… but we get many references to the myriad voices Szeth hears and has heard throughout his life.
Voices. Had there ever been a time when his life hadn’t been ruled by voices? Would he even know what to do if they stopped?
We’ve known since the start that he hears the voices of his victims, and of course he has the new twin voices of his highspren and Nightblood in his head… but these lines indicate that Szeth has had experience with other voices for much longer than the period since becoming Truthless and being used as a living weapon.
Those flashbacks can’t come soon enough, can they?
It is true, the Stormfather said. Odium is no longer Rayse.
Here we see the political and military fallout of Taravangian’s Ascension—though nobody in Urithiru knows who replaced Rayse. Even the Sibling and the Stormfather are at a loss. But Hoid is here to talk about the nitty gritty, and we get some good reinforcement of how Shards work.
First, we’re reminded of the consequences for Shards breaking promises.
*For a deity, breaking a promise exposes them to destructive forces from others—and the magnitude of the broken promise often determines the severity of the consequence.
We’ve known for some time that Shardic promises and agreements carry divine weight and breaking them opens up a Shard to retaliation, but this goes a little deeper into the details. There are proportions involved, it seems, and the way Hoid talks makes me immediately wonder about the Shards Odium has killed and splintered in the past: Ambition, Devotion, Dominion, and of course Honor.
It has always made some sense that Odium would be a particularly dangerous Shard, given its Intent. In a one-on-one duel, Odium would probably have the upper hand on Devotion at least, and possibly Honor, just based on the Intent of the Shards and how the Vessels might struggle to actually fight (as we saw happen with Vin when she held Preservation). But Ambition and Dominion could be pretty easily interpreted in martial ways… so how did Odium manage to defeat them?
Well, one long-running theory is that Odium had substantial help from another Shard. Autonomy is a popular choice, and the epigraphs in Rhythm of War indicate that Mercy was at least present when Odium killed Uli Da and splintered Ambition—though we don’t know what role Mercy played there, exactly.
Another option, however, could be that Odium simply engineered situations like the one we’re currently witnessing, and manipulated those Shards into breaking promises. Indeed, it’s possible that the original arrangement of the Sixteen—to go their separate ways and leave each other alone—played into this in the cases of Honor, Devotion, and Dominion. But Ambition, by all accounts, was off on her own, and Odium specifically sought her out early on.
If he could have tricked or otherwise convinced Ambition to break a Shardic promise… well, that might be just the ticket to scratch one Shard.
Thankfully, this is the Stormlight Archive, and one of the aforementioned Shards with a dead Vessel is front-and-center here. Whether it’s in Wind and Truth or if it’ll have to wait for some time in the final five books, it seems like a certainty that we’ll get the real story of how Tanavast met his demise and what, exactly, happened to Honor.
But that’s all for these two chapters. More secrets, more mysteries, and more theories lie ahead!
Fan Theories
On Discord, user “Lofty!” has this to say about the Chapter 18 epigraph:
Watch Brandon drop something like the mystery place was Ashyn. The phrasing indicates that they were ‘in search of one’—not that they knew much about the place. That’s why I’m leaning towards that possibility.
GiangDo over at Reactor’s chapter preview says this about Adolin:
Ugh I really hope Adolin doesn’t become Odium’s champion. His bitterness towards Dalinar is definitely gonna be a recipe for disaster.”\
And Zodda wants to talk about Honor’s shard:
Here’s my thing: while readers have been speculating that Honor could somehow be remade or reclaimed, presumably at great effort. Now Cultivation just walks in an straight up tells Dalinar that the Shard is intact and where to find it. So now my mind is spinning around this question: if such a huge piece of the puzzle is so minor that we get it for free, what is Brandon holding back for the huge reveal?!
We’ll be keeping an eye on the comment sections of posts about this article on various social media platforms and may include some of your comments/speculation (with attribution) on future weeks’ articles! Keep the conversation going, and PLEASE remember to spoiler-tag your comments on social media to help preserve the surprise for those who choose to wait for the full release. See you next Monday with chapters 21 and 22!
