Sadeas’s betrayal of Dalinar is the decisive reversal at the Tower: what appears to be a coordinated assault against the Parshendi becomes a deliberate operation to isolate Dalinar Kholin and leave his army to die. The act destroys the practical alliance between the two highprinces, reveals that their shared language of honor conceals incompatible visions for Alethkar, and forces Dalinar to confront the political cost of his changing beliefs.

Causes and Background

The betrayal grows from a conflict over what the war is for. Dalinar’s visions have commanded him to unite his people, build a fortress of strength and peace, and prepare for the coming Everstorm. Those instructions push him toward restraint, the Codes, and a concern for the kingdom beyond immediate revenge. He also questions whether the Alethi should continue sacrificing soldiers merely to maintain a campaign whose original purpose has become uncertain. His growing influence over Elhokar intensifies the danger Sadeas perceives: the king has begun discussing the Codes and even the possibility of retreating.

Sadeas, by contrast, treats Gavilar’s death as the consequence of weakness. He believes Gavilar should have attacked and conquered the Parshendi rather than pursue a treaty, and he sees Dalinar’s newer ideas as a repetition of that error. Revenge and conquest therefore become, for Sadeas, not competing motives but the organizing principles of the kingdom. Dalinar’s moral hesitation threatens both the war’s direction and Sadeas’s control over Elhokar. The betrayal is consequently political before it becomes tactical.

The Planned Assault

At the Tower, Sadeas proposes a single assault across forty bridges. Dalinar looks down at the exhausted bridge crews and recognizes what such a wave would mean: hundreds of men, many without the armor Sadeas has promised, would probably be slaughtered. Dalinar does not deny that his own attack also risks lives, but he refuses to make the bridge crews perform a task he would not undertake himself. He agrees to attack only after Sadeas has secured a landing point for his bridge crews, treating that limited concession as already more than he should permit.

The plan depends on precise positioning. Sadeas is to take the northern plateau on the Tower’s western side, while Dalinar assaults from the plateau just below it after Sadeas clears a landing. The Alethi intend to drive the Parshendi southeast, toward the cliff edge, while keeping a defensive formation ready in case another Parshendi army arrives. The arrangement makes Sadeas’s force the necessary hinge of Dalinar’s retreat. It also creates the condition that makes betrayal so effective: once Sadeas withdraws, Dalinar’s army will have neither a secure route nor enough bridges to escape.

The Betrayal at the Tower

The reversal comes when Dalinar reaches a high formation and sees Sadeas’s army retreating across the chasm. Half the army has already crossed to the northern staging plateau, and the eight groups of bridgemen Sadeas lent Dalinar have pulled back with it. Sadeas is not merely repositioning. He is abandoning Dalinar and his troops on the Shattered Plains, leaving them surrounded on three sides by Parshendi and taking all of his bridges away.

Kaladin Stormblessed soon understands the scale of the act from the bridge line. Dalinar’s force is surrounded as another Parshendi army floods into the sections Sadeas had supposedly been holding to protect Dalinar’s retreat. Kaladin pushes toward bridge ten, partly to confirm that Sadeas is not wounded and partly because the reality of the treachery is difficult to accept. He finds Sadeas unharmed, riding with his helmet beneath his arm as though leaving a parade rather than a battlefield. Looking back at the trapped army, Sadeas tells Dalinar that Dalinar’s honor would someday get him killed, then turns his horse away while the fighting continues behind him.

The immediate value shift is stark: coordinated strength becomes abandonment, and the promise of mutual protection becomes an almost certain death sentence. Dalinar is forced to hold a small rise defensively while Parshendi attacks replace one another around him. The betrayal therefore turns the battle’s military danger into a judgment on the meaning of honor itself. Dalinar’s willingness to risk his soldiers has not protected them from the system’s brutality, but Sadeas’s calculated withdrawal makes clear that the two men no longer accept the same limits on what may be sacrificed.

Sadeas’s Motives and Justification

Dalinar’s survival later ruins months of Sadeas’s planning. When the two men meet at close quarters, Dalinar sees tension and anger in Sadeas’s eyes and asks why he did it. Sadeas invokes an oath they had sworn together years earlier: protect Elhokar and protect the kingdom. He insists that removing Dalinar was compatible with that oath because he believes he can now defeat the Parshendi alone by splitting his army into a smaller force that races ahead and a larger force that follows.

Sadeas’s explanation then becomes more openly political. He says he had to take the chance to remove Dalinar because Dalinar was beginning to resemble Gavilar in his ideas and manner of speaking. Dalinar’s influence was reaching Elhokar, encouraging the king to think about the Codes and retreat. Sadeas had spent years trying to become Elhokar’s most trusted adviser, but Dalinar continued to command the king’s attention. The betrayal was thus also an attempt to delete a rival from the kingdom’s political network.

Sadeas refuses to call the act purely honorable. He admits that he wanted Dalinar gone, while still describing the abandonment as a mercy. In his version, death at Parshendi hands would let Dalinar die in glory, protect Elhokar from a man Sadeas considers insane, and turn Dalinar into a symbol that might finally unite the Alethi around the war. The language of mercy disguises an exercise of power: Sadeas claims authority to decide that Dalinar’s death would benefit the kingdom, even though the supposed service requires condemning an allied army without warning.

Consequences and Significance

The betrayal exposes the instability of the Alethi coalition. Its armies can cooperate tactically while their leaders pursue incompatible futures: Dalinar seeks unity, discipline, and preparation for a larger catastrophe, whereas Sadeas seeks conquest, revenge, and personal primacy beside Elhokar. The shared war against the Parshendi therefore does not erase internal rivalry; it gives that rivalry armies, bridges, and opportunities for concealment.

The episode also turns Dalinar’s private moral change into a public political crisis. His visions had urged him to unite the Alethi, yet the man who claims to defend the kingdom uses division as his weapon. The command to build strength and peace is tested against a battlefield where cooperation is conditional and human lives are treated as expendable matériel. Sadeas’s betrayal makes the contradiction visible: unity cannot be secured merely by fighting under one banner, because the leaders beneath that banner disagree about whom the kingdom exists to protect and what honor demands.

For Dalinar, surviving the trap carries a consequence beyond military endurance. Sadeas’s act confirms that the danger comes not only from the Parshendi across the battlefield but also from the ally standing beside him. The old friendship has become an adversarial relationship in which an oath can be interpreted as either shared protection or permission to eliminate the person judged dangerous to the state. That fracture gives the Tower battle its lasting significance: it is the moment when Alethi victory and Alethi unity cease to appear synonymous.