Colors, many of heroism, yield envy and fear. Time passes over passing time. Fear and envy yield, Hero of Many Colors.
Sarus has been running Bridge Four longer than anyone. He has trouble remembering the world before the Plains, and doesn't bother to imagine one after. But when a new bridgeman comes and offers the crew a chance at hope and freedom, Sarus can't help but take it.
Look to the sky, Curumo. All the old prophecies are being fulfilled. The Doors of Night are open, and Odium comes.
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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Prologue
To Die
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As World was Sundered to worlds, now God shall be Shattered to gods. History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
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Rayse watched through the eyes of his voidspren agent, Ulim, as the singers took the Shin man's Oathstone. He watched as they gave the man his orders. The Connection he shared with his Splinter was not enough—yet—to let them communicate directly. For now, he could only spectate.
Ulim did not stay to watch the assassin carry out his orders. He returned to the singer Venli's gemheart, continuing his slow manipulation. It was almost impressive, watching even this tiniest Splinter of Odium's power spreading the tendrils of its influence throughout her psyche.
Rayse kept his attention on the voidspren's experiences long enough to see Venli and her sister escape Kholinar, then withdrew.
Back to Braize. Back to the cold. Back to the aching, throbbing pain in his skull.
He shivered, hands rubbing at his arms to try to bring some warmth back. He had first noticed his illness before the Heralds had abandoned the Oathpact, but it was a very, very slow thing. He'd assumed he would have plenty of time to investigate it, to fix whatever was wrong with the Odium Shard, once he had returned to Roshar and broken the seal holding him here.
Then the Heralds had abandoned Talenel—the only one of them who had never broken. The Oathpact had bound them for over two thousand years. It had only been at the very last Desolation, the one the humans called Aharietiam, that he had finally broken Jezrien. Rayse had assumed it wouldn't be much harder to break Talenel.
The notion seemed laughable now. Four and a half millennia, and Talenel had never broken. Forget breaking the man—Odium needed to kill him, permanently. If such an incredible man ever Ascended, got himself a Shard…
Rayse. Rayse squeezed his eyes shut, coughing weakly into the cold night. He was Rayse. He might go by the name Odium, but the Odium Shard was his, not the other way around. He breathed into his hands, trying to warm them. It didn't help.
He knew what would. He turned and walked down the barren hill on weak, shaky legs, then descended the stairs into the subterranean depths of Braize.
The stairs carried on for over two hundred feet, cutting a straight line down into the depths of the ice-world. They ended in an aluminum door, thick and padded with insulation, with a wheel in the center to break the vacuum seal. Even as sick as he was, Rayse was still able to turn the wheel and pull the door open.
Heat blasted him in the face. The fire raged, far below. Chains dangled from the ceiling of the cavern, ending in hooks which could be lowered into the flames to heat them. There were still, even four thousand years later, ten great stones to which a person could be chained at the base of the vast chamber.
Only one was filled now.
Rayse stepped off the high balcony and gently floated down to the bottom of the cavern. The fire was warm around him—too warm. Sweat broke out on his skin. But it was better than feeling the fever ravage him in the cold outside.
Talenel's head rose slowly, his hooded eyes staring at Rayse. He was in one of his brief recovery periods right now, short stretches when the Fused and Voidspren allowed his body to heal before resuming the torment. It did them no good to kill him, although even if they did he would simply return here again. Odium, however, had ordered them—Rayse had ordered them not to kill the Heralds if they could avoid it. He suspected that the resurrective process by which the Shadows were functionally immortal might heal some of the mental damage they were suffering. It was a guess borne out by evidence, as those few times a Herald had accidentally been killed under the tender mercies of his servants, that Herald had never been the one to break next.
The Herald of War blinked stupidly at him, eyes glazed and hazy. At this point, the Fused continued his torture out of mere spite. None of them seriously expected him to break at this point, not after resisting for so, so long—but there was something cathartic, both for Odium—Rayse—and his singer servants, in watching the man's body break again and again.
It was one of the two reasons Talenel was still alive. Rayse had had a raysium dagger ready for most of the time they'd been trapped here, affixed with a gemstone of sufficient purity to trap a Cognitive Shadow. But Talenel had refused to break.
Something he hadn't expected to be a problem when he was first trapped on this Adonalsium-forsaken world: Braize was incredibly mineral-poor, with the sole exception of aluminum, which was abundant in its crust. Gemstones were almost impossible to find, large ones even more so. Odium's servants had been scouring it for gemstones of sufficient size and purity for the past two millennia, ever since it had occurred to him that another Herald might manage to die and end up here before he managed to break Talenel. They had come up with nothing. And so, Odium had only one weapon capable of taking out a Herald permanently—a weapon which he would have to save for whichever Herald finally did break, letting them out of here.
…Rayse's servants. Rayse's weapon. Drakefire, he was getting worse.
It was possible, of course, that killing a Herald would alert the rest of the fractured Oathpact. But this chamber in Braize's heart was lined with aluminum, and hopefully that would be enough to dampen the reverberations of the snapping Connection. He knew the concept worked in principle, but it was also limited—a strong enough Connection could shunt through the Spiritual Realm without being deflected by barriers in the Physical. However, with the Oathpact in the terribly frayed state it was, he suspected it would be enough. It wouldn't be completely secure, of course—the Connection would still be broken, and if any of the Heralds, Ishar in particular, tried to trace it up, they'd find the snapped end. But with any luck they wouldn't be alerted, which might just buy Odium all the time he needed.
"Odium…?" Talenel's voice was weak.
"Rayse," Rayse corrected automatically. Wait, no. The Heralds knew him as Odium. He shook his head. "Yes. Hello, Taln."
"Odium…" Talenel's voice slurred fuzzily, the vowels lengthened almost comically. "Mmmudio. No. Muido. Odiumuido."
He often babbled like this. Odium wasn't sure whether his mind would ever recover from the strain. And yet, even as every other thread in his brain frayed and snapped, this man had never crossed that one little line that would let Odium win his final victory.
Rayse. Rayse Rayse Rayse Rayse.
"Fusedesuf," mumbled Talenel. "Symmetryrs—Symmetryte--Symmetryrtemmys. Yes." The condemned man smiled stupidly to himself.
"Are you trying to Vorinize the word symmetry?" Rayse asked.
"Vorinirov," Talenel replied.
Odium stepped towards him, looking up at his body stretched like hide on a tanner's rack. The deep wounds in his flesh were almost healed now. Soon, the torture would begin again. Fruitless torture. Pointless. Habitual.
"How do you do it?" Odium—Rayse!—asked.
"Mm?" Talenel made a questioning grunt.
"Do you have any idea how long you've been suffering here?" Rayse asked. "Your friends abandoned you. And yet you've held out for so long, all alone. How? What do you have that none of them did?"
Talenel blinked. For a moment, Rayse imagined that a spark of lucidity returned. When he opened his mouth, Odium almost expected some great, hidden wisdom to emerge—a secret to the Herald's long, terrible victory. But all he said was, "Abandonodnaba."
Rayse bared his teeth. "Babbling idiot," he spat.
"Idiotoidi."
Rayse turned away in disgust.
"Wallaw."
Rayse stopped. Wall? He hadn't said that. He turned back to see Talenel looking thoughtful. His mouth worked, as though he was working through words in his head. It took him almost a full minute before he spoke again.
"Walled a city make, rams break that wall." Talenel said. "For walls that break rams, make the city a wall."
Odium blinked. "Did you just… compose a perfect ketek in fifty-four seconds?"
Talenel blinked at him, then slumped back down, apparently done speaking for the moment.
Rayse only realized just how long he had been staring at the man when a Fused, in the ethereal, red shape they took here when they lacked bodies, approached him. "Lord?" it asked in a vaguely feminine voice. "Have we your permission to resume?"
Odium blinked at it, then looked back at Talenel. "What do you think, Taln?" he asked. "Should they start again?"
Talenel did not respond in any way. He might as well not have heard. Odium shrugged, then gave the Fused a nod. "Carry on," he said, then turned and stalked away, careful not to give away any sign of the weakness he felt in his limbs.
A brief application of Gravitation raised him back up to the balcony, and he stepped back out into the cold. As he climbed the stairs, he thought on what Talenel had said. Make the city a wall? What did that mean? Did it mean anything, or was it simply the ravings of a shattered mind?
Odium stepped out into the frigid night, shivering. He looked up at the dark sky. It was day, technically, but Braize's atmosphere was so thin, and the sun so distant, that the stars never quite went out.
He could pick out the glittering planet that was Roshar in the distance. He stared at it, feeling intimately aware of every one of the millions of miles between him and it.
Suddenly, he remembered the last time he'd been on Roshar in the flesh. During the so-called first Desolation, while he and Tanavast were still in the process of poaching humanity and the singers from one another.
They'd fought. Tanavast was skilled and powerful, but he was Odium, greatest and most terrible of Shards. Tanavast had nominally survived the encounter, but even as he and Ishar were burying Odium in his Investiture, Connecting him immutably to Braize, they had both known that the cost of the feat would, eventually, be his life.
So had Koravellium. She had been there, too, had watched Tanavast, her husband, with tears in her eyes, knowing there was nothing she could do to save him. She turned them on Rayse, and though there was hate in the inhuman, slitted gaze, there was pity there, too.
"I take comfort," she had said, "in knowing that what happens to you will be worse than what you have done to Tanavast."
"We'll see," Odium had snarled.
She shook her head, holding his gaze. "Tanavast may die," she said, "and Honor may splinter, but you? You will suffer identity-death, the real death, the end of self. You think you control Odium, but how long until he reasserts himself? How long can you hold out, Rayse, against the mind and soul of the greatest of the gods?"
Rayse had been banished to Braize before he could ask her what the hell she was talking about. He suspected, now, that she was talking about this.
How did you know? he wondered, staring up at distant Roshar, where she still lived alone. What did you know about the shards that I didn't? What didn't you tell us, that day on Yolen?
Koravellium was the only dragon among the original sixteen Shatterers. She was, in fact, one of only three dragons Odium had ever heard of. The oldest, Gostir, had died before the Shattering. The youngest, Frost, was still alive on Yolen as far as Odium knew, even all these millennia later. All three were, so far as Odium could discern, the oldest beings in the cosmere, save Adonalsium itself. Perhaps they were even older than it was, if that was what Koravellium had meant by something particularly cryptic she'd once said.
Rayse shook his head. Suddenly he realized just how far he had slipped. How long had he been calling himself Odium in his head without even noticing?
Identity-death, the real death, the end of self.
"Adonalsium," Rayse whispered. "I don't want to die."
The cosmere did not answer, for Adonalsium was dead.
Rayse let out a shuddering breath as his eyes slid closed.
It would not be Rayse who opened them again.
"Lord!" a Fused approached suddenly, blurring into being beside him in its haste. "A Herald is here—Chanarach is here! She is being brought to the chamber now!"
A slow, languid smile spread across Odium's face. He opened his eyes and looked at the Fused. "Good," he said. "Excellent. Give her our customary welcome."
"Yes, Lord!" and the Fused was gone.
Odium took a deep breath of the frigid Braize air. His smile widened. "Well, well, well," he murmured, thinking of a green dragoness who had, it seemed, been awaiting this day for many millennia. Whether with dread or anticipation, he was not yet sure. "It is good to be back. Farewell, Rayse. Your sacrifice is appreciated."
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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1
Despair
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Something is very, very wrong. Have I gotten your attention yet? No jokes. You know I wouldn't write a letter at all if things weren't dire.
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Sarus was roused by the sound of horns. He stumbled to his feet, ignoring the fearspren bubbling up around the other bridgemen. Not one of the violet marbles were clustered around him. There were only exhaustionspren stirring where he stood. Perhaps this time he would manage to die.
A new figure jogged up to Bridge Four as Sarus took his usual position at the front of the blasted thing. His hair was Alethi black, like Sarus' had been before the strain of bridge runs had started to gray it prematurely. Notably, alongside the ordinary slave brand on the stranger's brow—something many bridgemen, Sarus included, shared—he bore a shash glyph, signifying danger. Some idle process in the back of Sarus' head wondered if this poor bastard had attempted one too many slave rebellions to be sent down here to die. The rest of him didn't really care.
Gaz followed the new bridgeman to the yard, looking the crews up and down. He stopped at Bridge Four, brow furrowing, then looked at Sarus. "What happened to your bridgeleader?"
Sarus just gave Gaz a slow blink.
"Dead," said one of his teammates. "Tossed himself down the Honor Chasm last night."
Realization spread across Gaz's face as he stared at Sarus. He swore. "You were told to keep that storming mouth of yours shut. Months of silence, and now you finally say something?"
Sarus just stared at Gaz's fuzzy outline before him. His tongue felt thick and heavy behind his teeth.
Gaz cursed again. "Storming dullard. I'll run near you lot, listen for my commands. We'll find you a new bridgeleader once we see who survives." He pointed at the newly condemned man. "You, lordling. At the back. Rest of you, get moving!"
The new man gave Sarus a searching look, but then shrugged and made his way to the back of the line. Sarus noticed he didn't have shoes—his feet would be brutalized by the end of the run.
It wouldn't matter if they didn't beat the Parshendi to the plateau. Gaz had put the newcomer at the back of the line. That meant he would be at the very front for the final approach. Bruised and wounded feet would not bother a corpse, and no one survived the front row.
No one, that is, except for Sarus.
Sarus shook his head muzzily and stooped at the knees, grabbing the handles immediately front and center and heaving the bridge upwards. Men filed into two of the other places in the front row, fearspren boiling around them as they readied themselves to die.
The bridge soon started to move, and Sarus moved with it. The uneven rock of the Shattered Plains passed beneath his feet as he jogged along, Bridge Four on his shoulders. He heard the army start up behind the bridges, but it was just noise to him. He kept his eyes on the ground in front of him, stepping over rockbuds and shalebark.
The bridge's weight rubbed through the thin padding of Sarus' leather vest and ground into the calluses on his shoulders. At this point, he'd been torn open so many times there that he wasn't sure he had any blood left in that part of his body. Small mercies.
As the number of permanent bridges across the chasms had grown, so too had the length of the first part of each bridge run—the ceaseless, mind-numbing jog from the warcamp to the first chasm they'd bridge. It was over an hour, this time, before Gaz finally called a halt.
With practiced efficiency, Sarus dropped the bridge, alongside all the other dead men in his crew, then shoved it across the gap.
The other bridgemen fell to the ground, crumpling like puppets with cut strings. Sarus did not. He slowly went through a few stretches, then sat leaning against the bridge itself, watching the army pass him by. As he did, for just a moment, he thought he saw a small figure, like a four-inch-high woman covered in oil, standing on the red-brown stone beside the bridge, watching him. When he looked again, she was gone.
It wasn't the first time he had hallucinated her. It probably wouldn't be the last. Sometimes he wondered what part of his bruised and battered psyche she represented. The temptation, perhaps, to cast himself into the pit and end this cyclic purgatory?
But he hadn't seriously considered throwing himself into a chasm in months. At this point, he figured it was even odds whether he'd eventually manage to die, or if he'd survive to the end of the entire storming war. If that happened, well, he wasn't sure what he'd do. But it would be a far sight better than this.
Suddenly, the new bridgeman, with the shash brand, picked himself up and started rubbing at his muscles. His feet already resembled ground meat, and Sarus knew it would get far worse before it got better. Gaz gave the bridgeman a bewildered look, but by now the man was used to Sarus doing much the same on long runs. He'd learned from long experience that there was nothing more painful than cramping on the way back to the camp. This new bridgeman must have known the same thing.
The newcomer looked up and met his gaze. His eyes were a particularly dark brown, and with his brow furrowed his gaze bore an intensity that reminded Sarus of faraway days spent training in a well-kept courtyard under a clear, sunny sky. Sarus looked away, back towards the men marching across the gap.
The column of the army was ending. Sarus turned and looked at the column of armored lighteyes. At their center, as always, was Highprince Torol Sadeas. He pointedly ignored Sarus' eyes on him as his horse trotted past, hooves thudding resonantly on the wood of Bridge Four.
As the last lighteyes' horse stepped onto the bridge, Gaz shouted for the bridgemen to stand. The new arrival heaved a visible sigh of relief as he stood, but then his face fell at a brief word from the man beside him.
Sarus followed Gaz across the bridge, the rest of the crew beside him. They tugged the bridge across behind after them, picked it back up, and started on again.
Sarus had always found this part even more tedious than the long run across the permanent bridges. Repeatedly picking up the bridge, carrying it across a plateau that was sometimes less than a mile across, then tossing it over the chasm and waiting for the army to pass. Watch Sadeas ignore him again, then cross the bridge and do it all again. Over and over and over.
After the first few chasms, the new bridgeman started staring at Sarus during their brief respites, as if drawing the strength to continue to care for his body from his apparent stoicism. After a few more, it stopped being enough, and the new man started flopping down alongside all the others.
Sarus didn't join them, though the exhaustionspren around him were puffing up with as much vigor as ever. His body was tired, sure, but the real fatigue was mental, and wasn't born of this one bridge run.
It was born of all the ones before.
Eventually, the dreaded command came. "Switch!"
Sarus stared as the other men around him rotated positions. Men from the front went to the back, men in the back came up to the front. Gaz steered the new bridgeman up beside him. "Newcomers get to go first here, Lordship," he sneered.
The new man's brow furrowed, looking Sarus up and down. "He's been here the whole time though," he said to Gaz, gesturing in Sarus' direction.
"Never you mind this idiot," Gaz said. "You just pick up that bridge and get moving."
They started the last march. Four of the slots in the front row were filled by men now. Sarus could see the boiling fearspren and anticipationspren reappearing now—they always faded away during the middle part of the run, while men were too tired to think of the approaching danger, but they returned during this last stage. Up ahead, the last chasm approached, and on the other side…
"Agonies of Taln," whispered the man on the new bridgeman's other side, the left-front corner of the bridge. "They're already lined up. Storms, we're dead!"
The front row of Parshendi knelt, pulling back the strings of their shortbows. The row behind did the same over their shoulders.
Kill me, Sarus begged silently. For Yaezir's sake, kill me this time.
Behind him, men were screaming as they ran towards the line of nocked arrows. Beside him, the new bridgeman's eyes were wide with horror. It was some luck, Sarus thought, to die on his very first run with the bridges. Whether it was good or bad luck, he wasn't sure.
The Parshendi loosed their arrows.
The first wave killed the two men on the outside of the front row, leaving Sarus and the new bridgeman alone. The next line of projectiles missed them both, too, though Sarus heard the familiar sound of another bridge falling on its surviving crew, too few to keep it lifted.
Now, the new bridgeman was screaming. Sarus remained silent.
A third volley. Another bridge fell. Sarus didn't; nor did his new comrade. He felt an odd kinship with this man, this fellow impossibility, who seemed to suffer the same strange fate as Sarus himself—to live where other men always died.
Before the Parshendi could ready another volley, Bridge Four reached the chasm. Sarus hoisted himself out from under the bridge, but before the crew could push it across the chasm, a fourth wave of arrows came, and more men died. Still, Sarus and his new friend survived.
They shoved the bridge across the chasm, barely managing it with so many dead. As the far side of the bridge hit the other end of the chasm, the new bridgeman fell over. Sarus blinked at him, but there was no arrow in him. Mere exhaustion had felled him, and as Sarus watched, his eyes flickered shut as he yielded to unconsciousness.
Sarus shrugged, ignoring the ongoing hail of arrows as he watched the army march towards the bridges. The darkeyed front ranks broke as they crossed the bridge, turning into a tangled mass of sprinting, shouting berserkers. Alethi arrows were joining the Parshendi ones now, sailing over the chasms to hit the Parshendi rearguard.
Sarus looked across the chasm and met the eyes of a Parshendi archer even as she stowed her bow and pulled out her spear. He thought he'd seen that particular pattern of red and white marbling before. She was staring at him, and though he wasn't any sort of expert in Parshendi body language, he thought her eyes seemed sad, even pitying.
Then she turned to fight an Alethi spearman as he crossed the bridge. Sarus watched as she died, her body tumbling into the chasm.
He looked away. As his eyes passed over his new friend, he saw a single windspren, hovering around the man's slack face, looking down at him. Was that concern in its girlish face? Impossible. He must be imagining it.
Suddenly, as though sensing his eyes on it, the spren looked up, meeting his gaze. Concern gave way to surprise. It blinked at him, then giggled and transformed into a ribbon of blue-white light, orbiting once around the new bridgeman before darting upward and out of Sarus' sight.
Sarus turned his gaze back towards the army still crossing the bridge. The lighteyes were starting to cross, now—and at their head was Torol Sadeas, passing mere feet from where Sarus reclined against his bridge.
He knew the man was aware of him. It wasn't coincidence that the Highprince crossed Bridge Four every single time both he and Sarus were present on bridge runs. But as always, he gave no outward sign that he even saw Sarus there among the dust and bodies. He passed so close that Sarus could have reached up and touched the greaves of his crimson Shardplate, stroked the fur of the horse he rode. Unlike its master, the horse at least acknowledged his existence, if only to jerk its head haughtily as it passed by.
And then they were gone, wading into the battle on the other side of the chasm. Sarus sighed. Ignoring the other lighteyed officers, he slumped back against the bridge and allowed his eyes to drift shut.
He was roused when the horns sounded to call the retreat. His eyes fluttered open. Around him, the bridgemen were groaning as they stirred. Glancing over, he saw that the new bridgeman wasn't moving at all. Had he survived the run, survived the front row, only to succumb to the strain?
No. He was still breathing. Sarus could see the steady rise and fall of his chest. It was with muted surprise that he noted his own sense of relief. This poor, dead man had survived alongside him.
Wincing, he forced himself to his feet. The other bridgemen were doing the same. "Pick up that bridge, you louts!" Gaz shouted from a dozen or so feet away. "Anyone who can't stand gets left behind!"
Sarus' brow furrowed. Could the new bridgeman stand? He looked over. The windspren was back, once again in the form of a girl with blue skin and clothes. It was flitting about the new bridgeman's face.
If he hadn't been looking, he wouldn't have noticed the unmistakable sound of a girl's voice, synchronized with the movement of the spren's lips. The windspren was talking. "Kaladin!" it—she—was saying. "Get up, or they'll leave you behind! You'll die!"
The new bridgeman—Kaladin?—made an indistinct sound. The windspren struck his cheek. It didn't seem to do much, but the fact that it did anything at all was bizarre.
"Dullard!" Gaz bellowed. While Sarus had been looking at the spectacle, the man had approached him from behind. "Get to your spot!"
Sarus turned, blinking at him. Gaz glared. He didn't spare a glance for Kaladin—assuming that was his name—and his strange spren.
Part of Sarus wanted to turn and help the other bridgeman to his feet. The rest of him remembered what had happened, over and over, back when he allowed himself to care about other bridgemen. Without a word, he walked back to the front of Bridge Four. Alongside the rest of the survivors, he hoisted it onto his shoulders.
For a moment, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the ink-black woman again, seated on the handle beside him. But when he turned, all he saw was Kaladin stumbling into position there, dark eyes dull with exhaustion.
Sarus tried not to feel too relieved. So someone else had, for the first time, survived the front row with him. It hardly meant he would survive it again. And when he inevitably did die, Sarus would be alone again.
Despair was hardly comforting, but at least it didn't hurt. Not like hope did.
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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2
Journey
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I hope my tone can get it through to you just how dire they are.
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Renarin sat with his knees up, feet perched on the edge of his seat. He hadn't clapped his hands over his ears, but it was a near thing.
Beside his right temple, an orange sphere no larger than the eye of a needle hovered, vibrating angrily. Renarin had tried to describe these spren to his family, but no one else could see them. It was only when Adolin had mentioned them within earshot of Jasnah that he had finally gotten confirmation of their existence.
Stimulationspren, she had called them, and elaborated, they're only visible to those suffering from a specific sort of overtaxed mind. I suppose your fits must count, cousin.
The highstorm outside rattled the walls of the building, but that wasn't what bothered him. No, what bothered him—what made him want to curl up into a ball and try to forget that there was a world outside his own body—was his father.
Dalinar Kholin was shaking like a leaf that a tree had failed to pull back in advance of the wind. Sounds emerged from him, sounds that might have been language, but garbled and transfigured into gibbering babble. He shifted in his chair, hard enough that its legs scraped against the flagstones. Renarin knew if he looked back, he would see his father's eyes rolling.
"Is this my fault?" he whispered, quietly enough to be inaudible over the mingled storm outside and stormsick man within. As he spoke, a single red flower petal bloomed out of the air beside him, drifting down towards the ground—a shamespren.
"How could it be your fault?" The voice emerged from a pocket in his coat, near his heart. It was a whisper, too, but even if it had spoken at volume, Renarin knew he would be the only one who could hear it.
"I burned a glyphward once," said Renarin, trying not to move. Merely shifting his weight too much set his clothes scraping against his skin in a way that burned like fire when he was in a mood like this. It wasn't quite one of his fits, but it was close. "I wished someone could understand what it was like to have fits like mine."
"And you think the Almighty answered your prayers?" asked the voice. "I don't think so, Renarin. I don't think the Almighty answers any prayers anymore, and if he did, I don't think he'd use them as an excuse to be cruel."
Renarin didn't answer for a few minutes. He just sat there, listening to his father's groans. Then, when the sound became unbearable, he spoke again. "Glys," he said. "If I was able to find the words you want me to say—could I heal him?"
Glys was silent for a moment in Renarin's coat. "It's possible," he said eventually. "It depends on what's wrong with your father. If it's a physical ailment, like your seizures, probably. If it's a spiritual one, though… probably not."
"And there's no way to tell, I assume," Renarin said.
"Not without someone else with access to the Surge of Progression," said Glys. "Sorry."
Renarin had met Glys only a few months before. The strange red spren—a mistspren, supposedly, though no mist had been about when he had first appeared—had started out cautiously, staying nearby without directly engaging with Renarin. The few glimpses he had caught had been more than a little unsettling.
But apparently Glys, like Renarin, preferred directness. So, once he had satisfied himself that Renarin fit whatever criteria he was looking for, he had introduced himself one late night in Renarin's bedroom. Renarin had been lying awake, cold sweat plastering his hair to his brow after another minor seizure, when the spren had suddenly bloomed out of the air above him like a ruby flower.
The introduction had been enlightening.
Renarin didn't really understand what it meant that Glys wanted him to become a Truthwatcher. He didn't find it too hard to believe that the Knights Radiant hadn't been the treasonous monsters the ardentia liked to paint them as. It wasn't as though he didn't understand the impulse to give up on one's people, and one Day of Recreance didn't completely overshadow at least ten, and probably far more, Desolations of tireless defense.
But as much as he wanted to learn more about the history of the Knights Radiant, about the mysteries of the orders to which he was a potential inheritor, he was also a man in Alethkar. That made historical scholarship… difficult. The only person he both felt he could trust with his inquiries and who could read was Jasnah, and she was half a world away on a research trip.
Which left him in this uncomfortable position. Glys wanted him to swear some sort of oath—an ideal which would formalize the Nahel bond between them and allow them to begin Renarin's training in the Surges. But Glys apparently could not tell him the words of that oath. He had been sworn to it, apparently, a very long time ago.
"Do the exact words matter?" Renarin asked suddenly, as the thought occurred to him.
"No," Glys said. "There were even Radiants, in the old days, who couldn't speak at all. All you have to do is intend a correct meaning. The exact words are beside the point."
Well. Did that make things easier? Renarin still needed to identify a specific idea without any way to—wait. "A correct meaning?" Renarin asked. "Not the correct meaning?"
"That's right," said Glys. "I wasn't there for them—most of the spren who had ever been bonded to Radiants died on the Day of Recreance—but I remember hearing about debates over the exact meaning of some of the Ideals. Especially the First Ideal."
"Then I only have to—to intend to embody an ideal that the ancient Radiants embodied?" Renarin asked.
He hadn't noticed his voice was growing louder in his excitement until, from across the room, Adolin called, "Did you say something, Renarin?"
Renarin froze momentarily, feeling the blood rush to his face. It's just Adolin, he told himself. You don't need to be embarrassed. The stakes are low. It's just Adolin. Just tell him—"No," he responded. "Nothing."
He thought he heard Adolin reply, but it was drowned out by a sudden shout from their father, seated between them in the center of the room.
Renarin took a shuddering breath and buried his chin between his knees. I hate this.
There were footsteps approaching. He looked up in time to see Adolin coming to stand beside him. He didn't look directly at Renarin, instead turning his eyes on the wall in front of him. "Do you have any idea what it means?" he asked.
Renarin blinked at him. "What what means?"
Adolin jerked his chin at the wall—no, at the tapestry which covered the wall. Renarin, despite staring at it for the past hour, hadn't even noticed its existence. This wasn't the room to which their father usually retired during a highstorm—they'd been caught somewhat unawares when it blew in, and they'd had to rush Dalinar into the nearest private room before he collapsed. It was decorated with artwork that was entirely unfamiliar to Renarin.
The tapestry seemed to depict a man standing beneath a solitary tree on a barren hill. He looked down at a battlefield. In his hand was an elegant shardblade, with a hilt clearly meant for two-handed use and a blade that terminated in a semicircle rather than a point. Woven artistically into the leaves of the tree above the man's head was the glyph for the word Journey.
"Journey, someone called it," said Adolin, cocking his head as he studied the tapestry, speaking slightly louder to be heard clearly over their father's mumbling. "I'd expect artwork titled Journey to feature something moving, wouldn't you? He's just standing still."
Renarin looked up at the woven mat, admiring the way the red of the hill gave way to the orange of the sunset sky. "Maybe this is the end of his journey, or the beginning," he said. "Or maybe it's not a physical journey at all. Maybe it's a metaphor for the journey he took to get there. The life he led—a life we have no idea about."
"Hm," said Adolin. Then he shrugged. "Seems unnecessarily convoluted to me."
Adolin and Renarin were both very straightforward people. Yet, somehow, they were both straightforward in completely different ways. Adolin was perfectly comfortable among the intrigues and mysteries of public life, easily dancing within the invisible lines of propriety, whereas Renarin was paralyzed with fear at the very thought of dealing with more than two people at a time, most days. But ask Adolin to follow the thread of a logical argument or a narrative, and he would just bemoan that his time would be better spent training, whereas Renarin derived infinite pleasure from teasing apart the intricate little knots that logic and metaphor could tie into existence.
The satisfaction was not in the complexity, but in knowing that the ideas that emerged from that complexity could not be expressed in any simpler way.
And, quite suddenly, like dawn emerging from behind the Weeping clouds, Renarin got it.
"You don't have to stay, you know," Adolin said quietly. "I can keep watch today. The storm has to be nearly past by now, anyway."
Any other day, Renarin would have protested that he was fine. That he could stay. That he wasn't any more bothered by their father's state than Adolin was. All of these things were true, but now he had something else on his mind. "Okay," he said. "Thanks. I can take a shift next time."
"Sure," said Adolin, though Renarin knew his brother would never trust him to watch over their invalid father alone. And he wasn't wrong—if an assassin did come after Dalinar Kholin, his younger son would be almost completely useless in trying to stop them.
For now, at least.
Renarin stood up, painted a quick smile onto his face for his brother's benefit, and then hurried out of the room. He bustled past the one honor guard they had posted outside the door—only one so as to avoid drawing too much attention, just in case—and sped down the hall.
"What's the rush?" Glys asked from his pocket.
Renarin didn't answer. His mind was racing. A concentrationspren rippled along beside him, hovering a few inches away from the stone wall, keeping pace with his hurried stride. Journey, he thought. Not a physical journey, but a spiritual one. The life we lead to take us where we are going. Not the destination itself, but the journey. Not the end of life, but the life before the end.
He reached his room, and after a moment of fumbling with the latch, managed to close himself inside it. He tugged the dimming cloth off of the sphere lamp on the wall beside the door, then fiddled with the glass. A small door in the glass case opened, and he pulled out the sphere.
For a moment he held it there between his fingers, staring at the pale blue Stormlight as it swam within the heart of the gemstone. Then he licked his lips, opened his mouth, and tried.
"Life before death," he said, and the moment he started speaking, the words fell upon one another like a rockslide. He knew immediately he was right. It wasn't him saying these words, it was these words being spoken by him. He was just the conduit, the catalyst. "Strength before weakness."
It was scary, honestly. Renarin's only defense against the dangers of the world was that he was in control of himself. It was why his fits were so terrifying. His body left his control, and his mind was left unmoored and untethered. This was similar, but where the seizures were cold and alien, this was as warm and familiar as his mother's arms around him. These words might not be coming from him, but as he spoke them, they became his.
"Journey," he said, "before destination."
And as he breathed in, he watched the Stormlight stream from the sphere into him. He felt it filling him up with power, with energy, like he was breathing in a good night's sleep.
These words, said a woman's voice, at once softly sultry and twistingly dissonant, are accepted.
Silence fell. Renarin stared at the dun sphere as the room grew dim, lit only by the grey light streaming in from his one narrow window. A spren bloomed over his head like a ring of dark blue smoke, rotating slowly around him like an orbiting crown. It was an awespren—something he had never seen before, had only heard described a handful of times.
"You did it," whispered Glys. "You found the words."
With shaking hands, Renarin replaced the sphere in its housing. "I found the words," he said.
Glys emerged from his pocket. As he looked at the crystalline spren, Renarin thought he could feel the difference—feel the shadow of the Nahel bond that now connected them. He couldn't read Glys' thoughts any more than he could read anyone else's, but he did feel a little less afraid that he would misunderstand what Glys was trying to tell him, or miss some subtext that others said should have been obvious.
"Welcome," said Glys, "to the Order of Truthwatchers, Renarin Kholin." He suddenly spun, the droplets of sparkling red which constantly dripped upwards away from him scattering like from a damp towel being wrung out. "I'm so excited!"
Renarin found himself smiling. It was an unusual sensation—he didn't often find expressions etching themselves onto his face. They normally had to be put there. Then it turned into a frown. "Glys? You seem… blurry."
"Blurry…? Oh!" Glys laughed. "Take off your glasses, Renarin!"
Renarin did, fully expecting the blurring around the edges of the mistspren to grow worse. Instead, he stared transfixed at the crystal-clear lines, completely visible without a pane of glass between his eyes and what he saw. "My eyes are—healed?"
"Lesson one of Stormlight healing!" said Glys. "Stormlight heals you by bringing your physical body into alignment with your spiritual conception of yourself. This is true both when you use Stormlight to heal yourself and when you use the Surge of Progression to heal someone else. That means that old injuries are much harder to heal than newer ones, because older injuries—especially ones that have forced a person to completely change how they interact with the world, like a severed limb—have had long enough to really embed themselves into a person's idea of themselves."
"But I've worn spectacles my whole life," said Renarin.
"Yes," said Glys, "but you've never really thought of yourself as someone who wears spectacles, have you?"
"I—" Renarin stopped. He didn't, did he? The spectacles were just one more marker of how he was different from those around him, how he failed to fit in with the rest of Alethkar. They themselves didn't matter—it was the difference they marked that was a part of him. "I suppose not."
"You should probably keep wearing them in public," Glys advised. "Maybe we can find someone who will replace the lenses with flat glass, so they don't make things look blurry to you. But it might make people wonder if they find out you've suddenly healed your eyesight."
Renarin grimaced. "That makes sense," he admitted. "I suppose the ardents have been preaching about how evil the Radiants were for a long time. If people found out I am one, it would probably just make things worse."
"It's… not just that." Glys' voice was suddenly hesitant. "I—I didn't expect you to just—I meant to talk about this before you swore to the First Ideal. I didn't mean—I never intended you to make the oath without fully knowing what you were getting into."
Renaring blinked at him. "Talk about what before I swore the First Ideal?"
There was a pause. "The two Surges of the Truthwatchers," said Glys slowly, "are Progression and Illumination. Progression will work the same way for you as for any other Truthwatcher, but Illumination… will be a little different."
"Why?"
"Because I'm… not a normal mistspren. It's hard to explain, and some of it is based on secrets that aren't mine to give out. But… well, you know how it's forbidden to seek knowledge of the future under Vorinism?"
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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3
Names
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I realize you're still angry. I understand. I'd say I was sorry, but you know I abhor lying to friends.
-x-x-x-
Sarus still remembered the run when Kaladin had first joined the bridge crew. He remembered how Kaladin had, at least for the first several plateaus, resisted the temptation to throw himself to the ground in a desparate bid for rest. He remembered how the man, clearly militarily trained, had forced himself up, pushed himself to rub and massage his own aching muscles, stayed upright and alert.
That man was gone. On Kaladin's second run, he had lasted fewer plateaus. The run after, still fewer. This was the first run that Kaladin had not even tried to remain standing for a single crossing.
Sarus watched the man lying spread-eagle on the ground. His upturned face was slack, expressionless. Not even pain showed on his features anymore. He might as well have been a corpse, albeit one still breathing. The anticipationspren and fearspren that followed most bridgemen had been replaced, as they were with Sarus, by exhaustionspren, bursting from the plateau like jets of dust.
Torol Sadeas crossed the bridge; Sarus sought his gaze, but as always, the man studiously ignored him. Sarus was suddenly conscious, however, of a prickling on the back of his neck, a sense that he was being watched.
He turned his head to look. In the shadow of the bridge, the thin strip of shade where the near side rested upon the rock, Sarus' personal hallucination sat watching him once again. She sat with her chin upon her knees, her silhouette barely distinct from the gloom around her.
Sarus looked directly at her. She did not disappear.
He frowned. She did not disappear.
The last soldier crossed the bridge. Gaz called the bridgemen to follow and to make ready for the next run. Sarus looked at him, away from the woman. When he looked back, he knew she would be gone.
She wasn't. She stood up as the men around him stirred. She moved slowly, as if to make sure he didn't miss any of her movements. She held out her hands to her sides, then visibly shrank. His eyes tracked her as she diminished until she was almost lost among the dust of the plateau. Almost.
Then that tiny speck moved, tracing a path through the dirt from the shadow of the bridge to his own. Then it jumped onto his shoe and began to creep up the leg of his ragged trousers.
He felt nothing. No pressure, no motion, not even a rustle in his clothes. But he watched as the speck ascended until it came to rest on his shoulder.
"Dullard!" Sarus blinked and looked back at Gaz. The other men were already halfway across the bridge. As he followed, he saw that Kaladin was in the rear—but if the man had so much as glanced back at him, he had missed it.
His eyes darted back at his shoulders. Yes, the speck was still there. It had not moved.
As he pulled the bridge back across the gap with the rest of the crew, he worried that he would dislodge it. He did not. When he lifted the bridge onto his shoulders, he worried he would crush it, but instead it leapt from his shoulder to his knuckle, in the space between the handhold and the bridge's underside.
There, in that tiny alcove that only Sarus could see, the speck expanded again. The woman sat upon his knuckle, folding one leg over the other, her gaze fixed upon him. As he began to run with the rest of the crew, she kept her balance perfectly upon her strange seat.
Sarus had always run the bridge with his head down, just like every other bridgeman. But today he stared upward at that strange figure. What had before been momentary, easily-dismissed glimpses were harder to ignore when they were so constant.
"Do you believe I exist now?" the woman asked.
Sarus almost stumbled, but the momentum of the bridge on his back pulled him back to his feet.
"Only one explanation was," said the woman. "But I do not understand it. Your eyes are, your ears are. Yet you do not believe them. Why?"
But Sarus was having a hard time denying them. The illusory woman had never made so much as a sound before, but now she was speaking directly to him. Yet no one else seemed to hear her. He glanced at the bridgemen to his sides—new men, both. This was their first run. They would be repositioned to the back, for the final run. If they were lucky, they might survive this run, perhaps even two or three more, before they inevitably worked their way up to the front. Neither so much as glanced up at the ink-black woman seated upon Sarus' hand.
"They cannot hear me," she said, watching his eyes dart to the other men. "Not because I am not speaking, but because I am not speaking to them. I am speaking to you."
Sarus blinked up at her.
She cocked her head at him. "You do not speak," she said. "You need not. You still think. That is enough."
Something about those words, spoken in such a clipped, matter-of-fact way, struck Sarus somewhere deep.
The bridge reached the next chasm. Sarus almost didn't notice. The woman shrank back down to a speck and leapt onto his shoulder as he ducked aside with the other bridgemen, letting the bridge fall and pushing it over the chasm.
"Your name is," said the woman—she must be a spren, he realized, like Kaladin's. She was still the size of a speck of dust on his shoulder, but her voice was as clear as ever. "I do not know it. But my name is, too, and that I do know. I am Archive."
A spren with a name? Well, he supposed that was no stranger than one which spoke. He wondered if Kaladin's strange windspren had a name. He wondered if Kaladin knew it. Come to think of it, could Kaladin even see the strange windspren, or was that also just Sarus?
"I am here for a reason," said Archive. "I do not remember what that reason is, but I know that it is. And I know that you are a part of it. I think it is important that you know that I exist."
But why now? Why had she decided to reveal herself today, rather than any of the thousand other days that were exactly the same over the past few years, or any of the thousand more to come?
"But more than that," she continued, and there was an oddly thoughtful quality to her voice now, rather than the snappish firmness that had characterized her up to this point, "I think it is important that you know that I am here for you. You are the reason I am here, and not in some other place."
Sarus felt his whole body suddenly shudder violently, as if wracked by a sudden gust. Distantly, he was aware that Torol Sadeas was passing him by once again, but for once he felt no desire to try to catch the man's gaze.
I am here for you.
Archive remained silent for the rest of the bridge run. She remained silent when they arrived at the target plateau—before the Parshendi, this time—and all the way back to the warcamp. But she also remained present. She sat upon his knuckle as he ran. She shrank down on his shoulder as he rested. She did not leave.
And she stayed longer. She was in the barracks when he lay down that night. She was seated on the edge of his cot when he went to sleep. She was still there in the morning.
Some days, Archive didn't speak at all. Some days, she only said a few words. But every day, she remained with him.
Sarus could not remember the last time he had been so grateful.
-x-x-x-
The weeks dragged on.
Kaladin still had not died. He kept running beside Sarus, sprint after sprint, plateau after plateau, battle after battle. Just as they did with Sarus, the Parshendi arrows seemed not to want to hit him.
It wouldn't last. It couldn't last.
It was early evening. They had made another run in the morning. Not one of the worst, but there had still been casualties. The evening had been punctuated by a brief highstorm—relatively mild, by Sarus' reckoning, and he had gotten fairly good at judging these things after years in poorly-constructed barracks on the exposed plains. Once it had blown over, Sarus stepped outside into the dusk to breathe the cool air and drink of the raindrops on the brisk, after-storm winds. Archive remained comfortingly visible, albeit miniscule, upon his shoulder.
Kaladin stepped out the door behind him. He stood abreast of Sarus for a moment, staring out at the rain. Then he turned suddenly to Sarus.
"Who are you?" he asked, in a quiet voice, rough with exhaustion and disuse.
Sarus looked at him. Part of him willed his lips to move, but most of him was too tired to try.
"You've been here longer than anyone," said Kaladin, and his voice audibly ached, as if he spoke around a sore in the back of his throat. "You're the last person who was here when I arrived. The last other survivor died today. Who are you?"
Sarus did not answer.
"Why are you still alive?" Kaladin asked, but his eyes weren't focused on Sarus anymore. They were staring hazily into the gloom, as if asking the ghosts of the dead. "Why you, and no one else?"
Sarus wished he knew. But suddenly, as he looked at this lonely figure standing in the shadows of the evening, he realized that this was not mere luck, any more than his own survival was mere luck. Something wanted this man to survive, just as something wanted him to survive.
The only question was, which of their devils would be better at preserving the solitary Damnation of their charge?
With a sudden, horrible selfishness, Sarus found himself praying to any monstrous god that might be listening that it would be Kaladin's destiny, and not his own, that emerged victorious. Maybe, just maybe, that would serve as a way out.
"Even Syl is gone now," murmured Kaladin, his voice rustling out into the damp air. "Just like…"
He trailed off. Then, without any further ceremony, he turned and started walking away from the barracks. The sheets of rain fell upon his shoulders, making his loose shirt stick to his back.
Sarus looked after him, frowning. Syl? Was that the name of—
"Syl—is that the honorspren?" murmured Archive on his shoulder. "But why—oh. Oh, no. That imbecile."
"Pleasant evening, Your Lordship?" Gaz's snide voice emerged from beside one of the barracks, just out of Sarus' view.
He saw Kaladin turn towards it. He didn't answer.
"Not stealing anyone's spheres, are you?" Gaz asked Kaladin. Sarus still couldn't see the overseer. "Not if you don't want to be strung up, you aren't." A pause. "You'd best not be thinking of running. You know there are sentries, don't you? They'll—"
He stopped, as if Kaladin had interrupted, but Sarus could not hear his fellow bridgeman over the rain. But Gaz did not object as Kaladin kept walking in the direction of the chasms.
Sarus' heart sank. He wasn't even entirely sure why.
"Lordling!" Gaz called.
Kaladin turned back. Sarus couldn't see his eyes, but his face was set in the slack, expressionless rictus of a man who felt no need to impart any emotion onto his own corpse.
"Leave the sandals and vest," Gaz said. "No sense sending someone to fetch them."
There was a pause. Then, in quick, economical movements, Kaladin shucked his vest, kicked off his sandals, and turned away again.
Sarus was surprised to find that he was affected by this. He wanted to reach out. He wanted to run after Kaladin, to stop him, to pull him back. He did reach out—his hand extended before himself, almost unbidden. His mouth opened, his tongue dry and heavy in his mouth.
But as Kaladin drew further and further away, he let his hand fall again. His mouth closed again. His eyes prickled, but if his cheeks were wet, it was only with the rain.
"He goes to die," said Archive. She sounded mournful. "The honorspren must have realized he was crumbling. His resilience was not. Or, at least, not enough."
Or maybe, Sarus thought, he was just courageous enough to take the step Sarus was too much a coward to.
"Will you save him?" Sarus turned his head to see that Archive had grown—still small, but now large enough for him to make out her face, upturned and watching him from her perch on his shoulder. "You can. If you wish."
Will you leave me if I don't? Sarus wondered.
But Archive could not hear his thoughts. She just watched him. Her eyes, though just as black as the rest of her, reflected light differently. Where most of her body was strangely iridescent, like molten oil, her eyes glittered like gemstones in the dusk.
For a moment, he was almost tempted to ask aloud. To open his mouth, stretch his tongue, and form words for the first time in years. To speak and be heard. To allow the sound of his voice to shape the air, to emerge out into the quiet and change the state of the world in some miniscule way.
But even as his lips parted, he closed them again. He started down at Archive for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked back into the barracks.
Archive let out a soft sound that might have been a sigh as he lay back down on his cot, but she did not leave. She just shrank back down again and sat on the edge of his cot, like every other night.
The empty cot to Sarus' right seemed loud somehow, demanding, accusing. Sarus tried to ignore it as he stared up at the barrack's ceiling.
He still had not managed to fall asleep when the barrack's doors burst open. A cold breeze drifted in, carrying with it a dead man.
Kaladin was a man transformed. The slack face was replaced by hard edges and narrowed eyes. His brown eyes flashed in the half-light. The ribbon of blue light that was his windspren—or was she an honorspren, as Archive had seemed to suggest?—hovered once more over his shoulder. He stomped over to Sarus' bunk and looked down at him. Sarus looked up and met his eyes.
"You're not actually dull or slow," Kaladin said. It wasn't a question. "If I asked your name, would you tell me?"
For a moment, Sarus just blinked at him. Then he shook his head.
"Fine," said Kaladin. "You mind if I give you a name, until you tell me or I find out what yours is?"
Sarus shook his head again.
"All right. I'll call you Tesh," Kaladin said, reaching a hand down towards Sarus' prone form. "I'm Kaladin."
Sarus suddenly imagined he and Kaladin were two candles, and that Kaladin had tilted his wick into Sarus to allow him to share in a flame that he had somehow brought back into the cold dark of the Shattered Plains. As Sarus reached out and took Kaladin's hand firmly in his own, he imagined that he was allowing himself to ignite.
Kaladin did not smile. But he nodded at Sarus, and there was kinship in his eyes. Then he turned to the next bridgeman.
Sarus listened as he gradually coaxed names out of the other bridgemen. He seemed to be hoarding them, like a brightlord with spheres or an ardent with words.
"He yet is," said Archive quietly. "The honorspren must have returned. Good."
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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4
Courage and Generosity
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Your policy of nonintervention must come to an end. You may find issue with my tone of certainty. I ask that you read on to see why I take it.
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Twenty Years Ago
For a moment, Torol wasn't sure what had woken him.
He gazed up at the dark corners of the vaulted ceiling. Nomon was bright tonight, and its pale blue light filtered in through the curtains over the bedroom's western window. The bed beneath him was soft, and warmed by Ialai's body at his side, curled around him. A chicken crooned a strange, alien melody into the moonlit night outside, but it was far too quiet to have woken him.
Then he heard it—a sound made not by a chicken, but by a child. A babe wailing in hunger or loneliness, from somewhere below his balcony.
Three weeks ago, Torol would have called the nearest servant and ordered them to find the child and silence it, or at least remove it from his hearing. But a lot had changed in the past three weeks. So instead, he quietly extricated himself from Ialai's limbs and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood, fumbling for the warm green robe at the bedside and wrapping it around himself before stepping out into the dark hallway.
One of his ardents was already moving quickly and quietly down the corridor. Even in the dark, Torol saw his grimace when he noticed his Highprince coming out of his bedroom. "I am so sorry, Brightlord," he said in a whisper. "I have no idea whose child that is, but I assure you neither it nor its parents will trouble you again."
"It's all right," said Torol, and was surprised to find he meant it. "Children are loud, as I have recently learned." He hesitated. "The sound seems to be coming from below my balcony," he said. "I'll come with you to see what the matter is."
The ardent blinked at him for a moment, but clearly knew better than to question him. "Very well, Brightlord," he said. "Lead on."
Torol turned and strode down the hall. The thin mat beneath his bare feet helped to insulate him from the chill of the flagstones and muffled the sound of his passage as he descended through the castle.
Castle Sadaras was a very old structure—one of the oldest in Alethkar, or so the ardents had told him when trying to flatter him. It was a magnificent display of his wealth and prestige, they said, to live in a building which had been constructed in the first years of the Age of Solitude. Most of the time, he didn't care at all, except occasionally to be glad that at least Kholinar was older. He wouldn't have liked having to move out just to cater to Gavilar's thirst for history and legacy, and if he had been the one living in an ancient Dawncity, he had a feeling he wouldn't have been for long.
But tonight, something about the dark grey stone felt weightier. The castle was silent, the stiff silence of an old man trying not to move lest his bones creak. He felt as if he was being watched as he walked down those dusky hallways, lit only by the pale green glow of the occasional emerald sphere-lamp. The viridian light seemed to penetrate his flesh like the gaze of the Almighty.
He shook off the strange sensation. His moods had been odd, these past three weeks. So much had changed. He finally understood how Dalinar had felt on that strange day three years ago, before the bloodletting had begun on the Herdazian border.
Dalinar had not been back to see his son for more than two weeks at a time since then. Even Torol, as often as he led his armies, had not been away from Ialai so often. He suspected Gavilar was trying to keep Dalinar away from Kholinar, where he was useful instead of a liability. It was a shame—Torol liked Dalinar, liked his forthrightness, his simplicity—but he couldn't fault Gavilar's logic. A man like the Blackthorn would never be satisfied without blood to wash his blade. If it wasn't provided, he would find some.
It was an admirable trait in Dalinar, to be sure. But not a trait ideal for the work of statecraft in the heart of Alethkar. In this, Gavilar was more similar to Torol than he was to his own brother. Alethkar at war needed a warrior. Alethkar at peace needed a liar.
When Torol finally reached the great wooden doors, there were already several servants bustling about. One almost walked into him before noticing the rich cloth of his robe and the Sadeas sigil on his breast. She stumbled back, eyes wide with fear, then bowed low. "Brightlord," she said. It was one of the darkeyed maids—not a slave, but no higher than sixth or perhaps fifth nahn. Ironically, this placed her far lower in social importance than even the most useless of his ardent slaves.
There was a bundle in her arms—a bundle that was squirming. "Is that the child?" he asked.
She hesitated. Her back straightened slightly, seemingly an unconscious act, though she remained bowed before him in a posture that could not possibly be comfortable. "It is, Brightlord," she said. "I am so sorry if he woke you."
"Is he yours, then?" Torol asked, and was surprised that he didn't have to try keeping anger out of his voice, because there wasn't any to begin with.
The maid clearly didn't want to risk it, however, as she shook her head so rapidly it seemed in danger of flying off like a weak-rooted rockbud in a highstorm. "No, Highprince," she said quickly. "He does—we have not found whose he is."
Torol blinked, looking around at all the assembled servants and slaves watching him. "None of you?"
"No, Brightlord," said the maid. "Only Jinsha has had a child within the past several months, and hers was stillborn."
"Then where did he come from?"
The maid gestured helplessly. "I have no idea, Highprince."
"We will send guards to Sadear in the morning to track down whoever thought it would be clever to leave their child beneath the Highprince's window," said the ardent beside him. "I assure you, Brightlord, an example will be made of whatever darkeyed idiot tried this."
The maid had an odd look on her face. "Um, about that, Ardent Lathas. The boy is…" she trailed off, glancing helplessly at another ardent who had already been here when Torol arrived.
"The boy is possibly lighteyed," the ardent said stiffly. "It is… difficult to tell in this lighting. We will have to examine his eyes in the morning."
"How can it be difficult to tell if a child is—" Torol cut himself off, stepping forward. "Give him here."
The maid offered him the small bundle, and suddenly Torol was greeted by a tiny face, gazing up at him.
It was true. The boy's eyes appeared to be a perfectly neutral grey, reflecting the pale blue light of Nomon and the green of the sphere-lamps in a prismatic blend of color. They were a shade too dark to be light eyes, and a shade too bright to be dark eyes. Torol had never seen anything quite like it.
The infant blinked up at him, and he was suddenly thrown back to another bundle of almost exactly the same size, which he had held not three weeks before. He forced his hands to remain steady as he handed it back to the maid. "You're right," he said. "It's hard to tell. Until we can determine his lineage, let's assume first nahn."
"That seems wise, Brightlord," said Ardent Lathas. He looked at the maid. "Jinsha is still producing milk, isn't she?"
"Yes, sir," said the maid. "Shall I give the child to her to feed?"
"With your leave, Brightlord?" the ardent asked, looking up at Torol.
"Yes," said Torol absently. "That would be best. Tomorrow, send a few guards into town to try and find his parents."
The servants bowed and leapt to do as they were ordered. He watched them for a few minutes, thinking.
He had a feeling they would find no parents. It didn't make sense that anyone would be able to creep into the most heavily guarded compound in the entire highprincedom just to drop off a strange infant. Something more was happening.
Torol Sadeas was not a strong believer in providence. He had ardents to deal with the day-to-day of religion. So long as they burned his glyphwards and continued offering him meaningless platitudes about his righteousness, he was happy to focus his attention on worldly affairs. But tonight seemed somehow less than worldly—or, perhaps, more than worldly.
It wasn't normal for nobility of the second dahn to mingle with darkeyes. But perhaps it would do little Tailiah good to have a playmate her own age. If the only option for that was this strange little boy with eyes that might just be light anyway, well, maybe that was all right.
Of course, Tailiah would mingle with Dalinar and Gavilar's children. But Elhokar was six years older than Tailiah, and Adolin was four. Even that was, proportionally speaking, a very large gap for an infant.
Torol knew this was a bit out of character for him, but perhaps parenthood was a form of temporary insanity. If he changed his mind, it wouldn't be hard to send the boy away somewhere else once he was old enough to travel.
He let out a breath, shrugged to himself, and returned to bed.
-x-x-x-
They found no parents. Even offering a reasonably generous reward of spheres was not enough to convince any of the darkeyes of Sadear to identify any of their fellows who might have had a recently-born child mysteriously vanish—or, at least, none of the darkeyes who came forward were able to make any claims that were not obvious attempts to fleece Torol of his spheres.
The guards saw to these, of course.
A week passed, two, and still there was no sign of a parent for the strange grey-eyed boy. Ialai was at first reluctant to allow him to stay at Sadaras, but her heart softened when she eventually had occasion to see him suckling at the maid Jinsha's breast. Torol was at least comforted that if parenthood was a form of madness, he wasn't alone in it.
Two weeks became three. Three became four. At the end of the fifth week, just a few days before Torol needed to leave once more for the war at the Veden border, he instructed his guards to stop searching for parents who clearly would not be found.
The maid Jinsha seemed relieved. It seemed she had grown attached to the tiny creature that depended on her for life.
That night, over his dinner, the ardent who had met him in the corridor that night—by now, Torol had forgotten his name—approached him between courses. "Highprince," he said with a bow. "Maid Jinsha requests your leave to name the child."
Torol blinked. "To name—oh." It hadn't even occurred to him that the odd circumstances might make it unclear who would have naming rights over the boy. The word yes hung on the tip of his tongue for a moment, but he hesitated. Turning to Ialai, seated at his right beside the small, private dining table, he asked, "What do you think?"
She considered for a moment. "He should have a proper Vorin name," she said. "Not one of the common darkeyed names so many of the lower-dahn servants have." She shrugged. "But beyond that, I don't particularly care."
Torol nodded at the ardent. "Relay that instruction to the maid," he said. "She may name him, but his name is to be approved by an ardent."
"Very well, Highprince," said the servant with another bow.
"And tell me when he has been named," Torol added. "I'm tired of thinking of him as the boy."
"Yes, Brightlord." He bowed again and backed out of the room, just in time for the next course to arrive.
Not two hours later, just before Torol and Ialai retired to bed for the evening, the ardent returned. "The boy has been named, Highprince, Brightlady," he said. "It is not the most traditional name, but it is suitably Vorin. His name is Sarus."
Sarus. Torol tried to work out the meaning behind it. Was the sar derived from saras, or was it sas, and then rusuh? No, that didn't make any sense—that would vaguely mean generosity of nothing, or something like it. Something else entirely? "What are the glyphs?" he asked finally.
"Sadas rusuh, Highprince," said the ardent.
Oh. Torol, as an awespren momentarily blossomed over his head before fading away, was surprised to find how affected he was. Sadas technically meant courage, but it was also the first of the two glyphs in the House Sadeas glyphpair. So, while little Sarus' name technically meant courage and generosity, it also meant generosity of Sadeas.
He hadn't expected the maid to be quite so grateful just to be allowed to name the boy.
"I see," he said finally. "Very good. He is healthy?"
"Yes, Brightlord."
"Excellent. See that he remains so while I'm gone."
"Remind me when you're leaving?" Ialai asked.
"Two more days, love," said Torol, giving her a wry look. "War waits for no man, I'm afraid."
"Of course," she said, smiling at him. "You have a duty to uphold. I know. Just as I know you will return as soon as you can."
Thanks to Elran for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
-x-x-x-
5
Bridgeleader
-x-x-x-
I write to you now from Roshar, as you may know depending on how this letter found its way to you. However, quite recently I was on Ashyn, and there I saw things that, if I may be frank, I found utterly terrifying.
-x-x-x-
Sarus was, for the first time in more than five years, woken by the touch of another human being. For a moment, he didn't even realize what the pressure on his shoulder was, until Kaladin spoke above him.
"Tesh," he said. "Wake up."
Sarus sat up at once, blinking in the dim light that slipped underneath the door and through the thin spaces between its boards.
Kaladin took a startled step back. "That was fast," he said. "Light sleeper?"
Sarus nodded.
"You don't mind getting up early, then?" Kaladin asked.
Sarus shrugged, then shifted his weight off of the cot and stood up. The spren that followed Kaladin sailed up as a ribbon of pale blue light, orbiting around his head once before settling on his shoulder in the shape of a young woman. As Sarus blinked at her, her bright smile faded slightly into a look of confusion.
Archive had called her an honorspren. It wasn't a form of spren Sarus had ever heard of. Which made sense—it would have been more concerning to find that spren he had heard of had been able to speak all along.
His eyes darted back to Kaladin as the man stepped a pace away from him, searching for something in his face. "I'm going to try to get this bridge crew organized," said Kaladin. "Are you willing to help?"
Organized? What did that mean? Kaladin clearly had some sort of military training—did he intend to turn Bridge Four into a fighting force? For what purpose? It wasn't as though they were allowed weapons.
Still, something in Sarus was willing to grasp at even the vaguest, most illusory strand of meaning that was offered to his miserable life. He nodded.
"Good," said Kaladin. "If the men see you participating, it'll help get them moving. Thank you." Then he turned, marched to the barracks door, and flung them open with surprising force. The sunlight streamed in like a hail of Parshendi arrows. Groaning broke out all around Sarus, a plague that spread from bridgeman to bridgeman as sound and light woke them from sleep. At the front of the room, silhouetted against a backdrop of gold, Kaladin took a deep breath and shouted. "Up and organize!"
Sarus blinked at him. If Kaladin intended him to do something specific with that, he didn't know what.
"That," Kaladin said, glaring around at the rest of the men, "means get out of bed, out of the barracks, and form ranks! Now, storm you all, or I'll drag you out myself!"
Well, if Sarus had wanted specific instructions, now he had them. But even as he began to stride past their bunks, he knew he would be the only one. They were broken men, these condemned slaves. Despair was a blanket of black velvet, thick and muffling, laying over each of them.
They didn't want to be distracted from their misery. They didn't want to hope. Hope required thought, and thought was pain. They wanted to slide from one day to the next with a minimum of effort, trying to ease the passage of time until death set them free.
Sarus was no better than they were. He was just more bored. Even torture grew banal eventually. He had fallen so far into despair that even hope held no more fear for him.
He stepped up beside Kaladin, looking out into the morning sunlight. He was struck by a momentary thought that, six years ago, the blossoming dawn over the red earth might have been a beautiful sight. Maybe it had been, and he had forgotten.
Kaladin sighed. "So be it," he said. Sarus turned to watch as he stepped back into the barracks and stomped over to the nearest of those men who had turned over in their blankets to go back to sleep after his announcement. He grabbed the man by the arm and heaved, throwing his weight into a mighty tug, pulling the man bodily out of his cot. The man stumbled to his feet to avoid the alternative of rolling onto the floor.
"Storm off," the man growled, tugging his arm away.
Kaladin let it go, already throwing his weight behind a blow. His fist sank into the man's gut with a sound like air escaping from an inflated wineskin. The man doubled over with a wheeze, and Kaladin stepped forward, grabbed his ankles as he bent, and lifted the man over his shoulder like a sack of rockbuds. He staggered slightly under the weight, but soon found his footing and turned to leave the barracks. Sarus stepped aside to allow him to pass.
Kaladin set his burden down on the red-brown stone outside the barracks, then stomped back inside. Glaring around the barracks, he looked completely different from the defeated man who had stumbled out of the camp in the rain the night before. "I'll do the same to each of you," he said, "if I have to."
Sarus expected that he would have to, but for once he misjudged his fellow bridgemen. They stumbled to their feet and filed out behind Kaladin, Sarus at their head. They did not form ranks, although Sarus suspected that in many cases, including himself, they simply didn't know what that even entailed.
Kaladin turned to face the poorly assembled men. "Things are going to change in Bridge Four," he said. "No more sleeping in, for one thing."
"And what do you expect us to do instead?" asked one man—Azish, by his accent and dark skin.
"Train," said Kaladin simply. "Every morning before our chores, we're going to run the bridge in practice to build up our endurance."
At this, even Sarus couldn't help but stare at Kaladin incredulously.
"I know what you're thinking," said Kaladin, meeting Sarus' gaze before casting his eyes over the others. "Aren't our lives hard enough? Shouldn't we be able to relax during the brief times we can?"
"Yes," said a small, possibly Azish man. Sarus hadn't realized until this morning just how many of his fellow bridgemen weren't Alethi.
"No," Kaladin answered sharply. "Bridge runs wouldn't be nearly as exhausting if we didn't spend most of our days lounging. Our chores aren't meant to be hard work, they just keep us busy enough that the soldiers can ignore us."
And busy enough to keep us from getting any ideas, thought Sarus, who had been party to a few ideas over the past five years himself. He wondered if Kaladin was planning to try and organize an uprising.
It wouldn't be the first. Slaves rebelled all over Alethkar, every once in a while—and there were more slaves congregated in the bridge crews than in almost any other single population in the country. But such uprisings almost always failed, and none had been successful in the warcamps.
None yet, at least. In Sarus' experience, such efforts usually failed because of a combination of three lacks: a lack of training, a lack of equipment, and a lack of manpower. Kaladin, it seemed, might just have the first—especially if that was how he had earned the shash brand across his brow. And if he succeeded in motivating the rest of Bridge Four, he might succeed in bringing the other bridge crews into the fold—which might well be enough to give him the third.
But the second—the lack of equipment—would still be crippling. Did he have a plan to surmount that? Sarus hoped so—it didn't much matter to him, but it would be a shame to lead an uprising on with false hope, only to get all of them killed on the Sadeas army's spears.
"I'm your new bridgeleader,"—Kaladin was still speaking—"and it's my job to keep you alive. I can't stop the Parshendi arrows, but I can do something about you. I have to make you stronger, so that on the last sprint of a run, you can run quickly. I intend to see that Bridge Four never loses another man."
Sarus was struck by the weight of that final sentence. Kaladin spoke it with certainty—not the certainty of one confident he could succeed, but the certainty of a man who had no other choice.
One of the men started to laugh—a deep, full-bellied sound. More joined in, and Sarus saw laughterspren—something he had not seen in years—swimming through the air around them like a school of silver fish.
One of the men called out to Gaz. As the overseer stomped over, he asked, "Bridgeleader wants us to carry bridges as practice. Do we have to do what he says?"
"No," grunted Gaz. "Bridgeleaders only have authority on the field."
"Looks like you can storm off, then," said the bridgeman, before turning and going back into the barracks. He was followed by many of the others, though some peeled off and made for the mess hall.
Sarus stayed where he was as Kaladin looked after the others. The honorspren on his shoulder looked up at him. "That didn't go as well as you were hoping."
"No," Kaladin grunted—confirming Sarus' suspicion that he could hear her. "Not surprising." Then he seemed to notice Sarus still standing there, watching him. "You're still here?" he asked.
Sarus nodded, then shrugged. He had no better ideas for what to spend his day on.
Kaladin grunted. "Well, thanks. Not that it helped much."
Sarus shrugged again. To the rest of the bridgemen, he and Kaladin were nothing more than the two who had been here longest. They hadn't yet realized just how unusual that was—and none of them, including Kaladin, had any idea just how long Sarus had been here. Kaladin knew Sarus as the only man who had survived this Damnation longer than him, but to the rest of the bridgemen, the only difference between them was that Kaladin seemed to have gone suddenly mad, while Sarus had seemed mad the entire time.
"What are you going to do now?" asked the honorspren.
Kaladin didn't answer her in words—did he not think Sarus could hear her? He seemed to be avoiding looking directly at her with Sarus' eyes on him. Instead, he cast his eyes over in Gaz's direction. "Mm. I have an idea."
Across the field, Gaz caught Kaladin's eye. Sarus saw terror splatter across his face before he turned and bustled off. The violet marble of a fearspren rolled after him, hot on his heels.
Kaladin inclined his head slightly, facing away from Sarus, and mumbled something. A moment later, the honorspren on his shoulder shot off after the overseer as a ribbon of pale blue. Kaladin, meanwhile, followed more slowly. Sarus watched as the honorspren darted after Gaz while Kaladin stopped where the man had been standing before he fled.
A moment later, the honorspren returned, and after exchanging a few words, Sarus saw Kaladin turn and take a circuitous route around a barrack. For a moment, he considered following, but thought better of it.
The moment Kaladin was out of view, Archive bloomed into view on his shoulder, enlarging from a speck to a small woman the size of a fingernail. "Can you see the honorspren?" she asked without preamble.
Sarus nodded.
"Hear her?"
He nodded again.
"How unusual," she commented. "She is hiding herself. To most humans, she is not. Even to me, she is not. But she cannot hide from you."
Sarus wondered if Archive could do the same. If so, why did she always shrink down to avoid detection? Or perhaps Sarus' ability to see apparently invisible honorspren didn't extend to seeing whatever Archive was, and she was staying present for his benefit. The idea brought a strange, unfamiliar warmth to his chest.
A few minutes later, Kaladin emerged from behind the Bridge Two barracks, Gaz shouting after him—"You can't have authority without a rank!" The moment he came into view, Archive shrank down again.
Sarus saw Kaladin's lips move as he spoke quietly to his spren, hovering a foot or so in front of his face. She didn't bother to keep her voice down as she replied: "Where does authority come from, then?"
Sarus could just make out Kaladin's reply. "From the men who give it to you." The new bridgeleader met Sarus' gaze across the field. "Tesh," he called. "I'm going to train, even if it's just me. You coming?"
Sarus shrugged. Why not?
He followed Kaladin toward the lumberyard. A troop of carpenters were busy constructing more of the storming bridges that had been Sarus' life and death for the past five years. He caught up with Kaladin as the man was looking around for something. "See if you can find something we can use as a two-person bridge," the bridgeleader told him.
Sarus nodded and began the search. As he did, he heard Kaladin speaking quietly with his spren.
"Syl," he said. "You don't sleep, do you?"
"Sleep? A spren?" She laughed. Syl—was that her name?
"Would you watch over me at night?" Kaladin asked. He had drifted towards the other side of the yard, and Sarus had to strain to hear him. "Gaz might try something while I'm sleeping."
"You think he would?"
If Kaladin replied, it was drowned out by the carpenters' saws.
"You eavesdrop on them," Archive commented, still no larger than a speck of dust on his shoulder. "Why?"
Sarus shrugged.
"You cannot answer," Archive said, as though she had just remembered. "Is it because you do not trust them?"
Sarus considered that for a moment before shaking his head.
"Why do you trust them?" the spren asked. "You have not known Kaladin long, and the honorspren has never spoken to you."
Sarus shrugged. Really, it was just easier to trust Kaladin than not to. It wasn't as though he was exposing himself to any threat by being credulous. What could Kaladin do to him that had not already been done?
"Is it simple curiosity, then?" Archive asked. When he nodded, she asked to clarify, "About the honorspren?"
Sarus paused, then nodded slowly. It wasn't just the honorspren he was curious about, but he was curious about her. And it was about her that he felt he was most likely to hear when listening to her talking to Kaladin.
"I understand," said Archive. "It must be strange to find that she is. Or that I am. We have been gone a long time."
Sarus gave a quizzical look to his shoulder, where he knew she was lingering among the flecks of sawdust already settling on his vest. But if she saw his curiosity, she did not choose to elaborate.
Eventually, Kaladin found a suitable piece of bridge. It was a hair heavier than two bridgemen's usual share of Bridge Four, but the difference was small enough that Sarus expected he only noticed because of how very long he had spent running bridges. After asking a carpenter to borrow the plank, Kaladin led Sarus to a stretch of the yard just outside the Bridge Four barracks. Then they began to practice.
Keeping pace with a single other bridgeman was very different from keeping pace with thirty. Sarus had to constantly watch Kaladin's movements ahead of him, carefully modulating his speed to avoid falling behind or pushing ahead, either of which might have destabilized the partial bridge above them. Kaladin, thankfully, was clearly accustomed to rhythmic training. He moved in very predictable ways, which made Sarus' job easier.
Gradually, they drew a crowd. Bridgemen—both from Bridge Four and the other crews—as well as others gathered to watch the strange spectacle of bridgemen choosing to carry a bridge when they didn't have to. Some called out taunts and jeers, but Sarus noticed none of the other members of Bridge Four did so. Most ignored them, but a few seemed transfixed, as if they could not believe what they were seeing.
They ran for a long time—longer than any one stretch of a bridge run, although not as long as the full advance and withdrawal. Finally, Kaladin called back to him. "That's enough!"
Sarus slowed to a stop, doing his best to match Kaladin's pace. Together, they set the plank down, and Kaladin led him over to the carpenters' water barrel. It was normally forbidden to bridgemen. No one seemed inclined to remind them of that, today.
Between gulps of water, Kaladin looked at him. "Thank you," he said. "You didn't have to do this."
Sarus shrugged.
Suddenly, there was a tiny blue face inches from his own. He blinked, recoiling.
"You can see me!" Syl crowed, seeming to jump for joy in the air. Her jump carried her further, up and back, until she was sailing in a loop away from him, coming to rest up and a pace further from him than she had been. "I knew you could see me!"
"He can?" Kaladin asked, blinking at Sarus. "You can?"
Sarus nodded. He wondered if Archive would make herself known, but she seemed disinclined to do so.
"Huh." Kaladin glanced at Syl, then back at Sarus. "It's just you, I think. No one else seems to notice her."
"I can make myself visible," said Syl. "I think. But you," she waggled her finger at Sarus, "you can see me even when I don't want everyone to. And you can hear me, too!"
"Any idea why?" Kaladin asked, looking at both Sarus and Syl.
"Nope!" said Syl.
Sarus just shrugged.
Kaladin sighed. "Wonderful," he grumbled. "Two people willing to interact with me—one doesn't talk, the other talks enough for both of you."
Syl narrowed her eyes at him. "Is that sarcasm?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I knew it!" Syl cheered, then stopped, looking thoughtful. "How did I know that?"
"It's usually fairly obvious," said Kaladin.
"To humans, maybe," said Syl. "But a week ago I'd never heard of sarcasm."
Sarus wondered why Archive was silent. Surely she had some sort of opinion on this—but she wasn't offering it. Why?
He got his answer when Kaladin left to visit an apothecary after lunch. The moment he was alone, Archive popped back into view on his shoulder. "I apologize for my silence when the honorspren confronted you," she said.
Sarus blinked at her expectantly, awaiting an explanation.
For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Archive visibly hesitated. "I do not remember much," she said. "I suspect the same is true of the honorspren. But I do not think my kind are well-liked by hers. Or vice-versa."
Her kind? Sarus realized he had no idea what sort of spren Archive was. He raised a questioning eyebrow.
She seemed to guess at his meaning. "I am an inkspren," she said. "I do not remember what that means. I do not remember where I came from. I do not even remember exactly how long I have been here. I told you the first time we spoke that I did not remember why I came. That is still true, and I suspect it is also true of the honorspren. But as you are part of my reason, whatever it is, so Kaladin is part of hers. You understand?"
Sarus nodded.
"Good," said Archive. She was silent for a moment. "He is healing," she said. "Kaladin. This is important."
Sarus looked at her. For a moment, she seemed to be avoiding his gaze, before visibly forcing herself to look him in the eye.
"The honorspren—Syl—is helping him to heal," she said. "I hope I can do the same for you. Eventually."
You already are, Sarus thought. For a moment, he wanted to force the words out. To make himself speak. To break the wall of silence that had sprung up between himself and the world. He knew that once the first word was spoken, the rest would be so much easier. He just needed to get the first word out.
The very idea made him shudder, but as he looked at Archive, sitting on his shoulder watching him, he wondered if she felt just as alone as he had before she had reached out and spoken to him. He wanted to offer her the same comfort she had offered him—the same wonderful ending to the long solitude.
He opened his mouth. Archive's eyes widened.
The horns rang out. Sarus' mouth snapped shut as he rushed to his feet.
Something has taken up residence there. Something terrible. Something I do not—perhaps cannot—understand.
-x-x-x-
"Storming—line up!" Kaladin shouted, trying in vain to be heard over the clamor of a mustering army. "Form a line, all of you!"
He saw Tesh glance his way, then at the other bridgemen around him. None of the others reacted. Either Tesh was the only one who could hear him or, more likely, he was the only one who cared to listen. Many had been caught flat-footed, without the leather vests that kept their shoulders from being chafed raw against the bridge. There was a crush of bodies around the barracks door as those with jackets tried to get out, and those without tried to get in.
But nonetheless, the men eventually managed to assemble beside their bridge in the usual rotation. They all knew the pattern—every bridgeman was constantly aware of where he was in the rotation for each run. It was the only way to track how likely they were to make it back to camp that night.
Kaladin took his place at the front of the bridge, beside Tesh. He'd been there twice now since that first run. Tesh had never left. How the man stayed alive, Kaladin didn't know—and he suspected Tesh didn't, either.
He shot the unspeaking man a sidelong glance as they hefted the bridge over their heads. Tesh's face had gone slack, his eyes dull and dead. Kaladin could sympathize. He suspected Tesh had not been born unable to speak, nor had it been an injury or oath that had robbed him of words.
If Kaladin had been trapped here, running at the front of the bridge for so long—he could imagine eventually giving up on speech entirely. Although he already knew he wouldn't have survived long enough, at least not without Syl's intervention.
Twenty bridges set out onto the Shattered Plains. As they began the long march, Kaladin felt the ache in his muscles from the workout this morning. Tesh's presence at his side helped to ground him. Tesh was just as tired as he was, physically, and he was running just as determinedly as ever.
They crossed several permanent bridges, Kaladin leading his crew as they followed the path called out for them by Gaz. Then they came to the open chasms.
They thrust the bridge across the first gap, and then the rest of Bridge Four collapsed to the ground. All except Tesh, who remained upright without apparent struggle, as if all of this was nothing more than habit to him. Kaladin was barely able to stay standing beside him—but he did.
Tesh raised an eyebrow as Kaladin forced his hands behind his back in a formal parade rest. The silent man looked him up and down, and then—with some uncertainty—copied the posture.
"Look at the little bridgemen!" called a soldier in the line waiting to cross the bridge. "Hoping to grow up to be real soldiers?"
Kaladin shot him a look. He recognized the captain's knots on the man's jerkin. "How do you treat your spear and shield, squadleader?" he called. "This is my bridge. It is the only weapon allowed me. Treat her well."
He felt Tesh's eyes on him as he turned away from the soldiers and set his eyes on the horizon behind the army, ignoring the laughter of many—though not all—of the infantry around him. Then, quite suddenly, he saw out of the corner of his eye Tesh's attention snapping somewhere else. Kaladin followed his gaze.
Highprince Sadeas was crossing the bridge. Kaladin suddenly realized Sadeas had crossed Bridge Four almost every time he had seen the highprince on a run. Tesh's eyes were fixed on the man as he passed, red Shardplate almost gaudy with frivolous tassels on its helm.
The Highprince didn't look at the bridgemen. But suddenly, Kaladin wondered if Tesh's obvious fascination with the man was more than just the ordinary disdain of any darkeyed unfortunate to the lighteyes who held him in his situation.
He turned his head slightly to study Tesh. The man's face was perfectly blank. His eyes were so black that the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises as they followed Sadeas across the bridge.
Wait.
Hadn't Tesh had gray eyes? Kaladin remembered those eyes clearly, a dark grey almost pale enough to pass as light in the gloom of the barracks, the night before. But here in the sunlight, the eyes were two flints, black as pitch and hard as the rock beneath their feet.
As Sadeas's horse stepped off the bridge on the other side, a tension seemed to leave Tesh. He settled back into his stance for a moment before noticing Kaladin's gaze on him. He shot Kaladin a quizzical look.
"Do you have a history with the Highprince?" Kaladin asked.
Tesh's mouth thinned to a pale line in his tanned, leathery face. Slowly, he nodded. Then he turned his eyes from Kaladin and set them forward, clearly trying to put a stop to the conversation.
Kaladin didn't press. He had some idea what the story would have been, anyway. Sadeas is your Amaram, isn't he?
The soldiers finished crossing, and then it was the bridgemen's turn. They crossed the bridge, pulled it behind them, and started across the next plateau. The routine continued, cycling repeatedly enough times that Kaladin lost count. Every single time, Highprince Sadeas crossed their bridge. Every single time, Tesh focused completely on him as he did.
Then, finally, the dreaded command came. "Reverse runners!" Gaz ordered. "Cross and reverse!"
This was it. The next crossing would be the assault. He squinted, trying to see the edge of the next plateau—and, yes, there was a line of dark figures gathering there. They were still moving—the Parshendi had beaten them here, but not by much. It wouldn't be the worst bridge run Kaladin had seen, but it wouldn't be a good one.
He wasn't the only one who could tell. The men were rising up around him in silence, faces dark, eyes downcast, as though they were marching to their own funerals. As far as they knew, they were.
Beside Kaladin, Tesh turned and walked back towards the front of the bridge. He had never rotated from the first row in Kaladin's entire time with Bridge Four. He was as much a fixture as the bridge itself.
The rest of the crew was leaving a space in the center of the very back for Kaladin. Syl landed on the bridge above it, looking down at the opening. Then she looked at him. He couldn't read her expression.
Kaladin took a deep breath, then turned and followed Tesh. Several men—Drehy, Teft, Sigzil—stared at him as he passed them, walking up the length of the bridge.
Tesh blinked at him when he reached the front. Kaladin didn't look at him—instead, he tapped the man standing one pace to Tesh's left, Rock. "You're in my spot."
"What—"
"To the back with you." Kaladin was too tired to talk, too tired to explain. Was this how Tesh felt all the time?
Fortunately, it wasn't difficult to convince Rock to fall back. Kaladin took his place at the very head of the bridge. He was in the deathpoint—the very center of the front row. To his right was Tesh, and past him Adis. To his left were Murk and Corl.
I intend to see that Bridge Four never loses another man. Kaladin inhaled, then breathed out.
Syl flew down from over the bridge and alighted on his shoulder. "I'm proud of you," she said softly. Beside them, Tesh made a slight motion that might have been a nod.
The final run began. The Parshendi had managed to get into position while they had been lifting the bridge, and now the bows were being raised. There weren't quite as many archers as there had been on Kaladin's first run, but it was worse than any since.
The Parshendi fired.
Kaladin screamed his brother's name.
The arrows landed.
They zipped by Tesh, leaving him completely untouched. One scored across Kaladin's ribs. The rest of the front line—Adis, Murk, Corl—all fell like cremlings who had lost their footing.
But Kaladin kept running. The group of Parshendi immediately ahead of Bridge Four had lowered their bows, blinking in apparent surprise. Kaladin didn't know if they were just surprised to see two survivors in the front row, but their momentary lapse gave the bridge crew precious time.
Kaladin screamed orders, and the men dropped the bridge. With a heave, they quickly shoved it across so that its far end made contact with the Parshendi's plateau. Then, alongside the rest of the crew, Kaladin dove out of the way of the Alethi cavalry charge. As the battle was joined, the bridgemen were mercifully forgotten.
Kaladin finally had time to examine the wound across his chest. He quickly determined that it wasn't severe.
Tesh stood up. Kaladin watched his head tilt, eyes following a volley of Alethi arrows as they sailed overhead. Then he turned to Kaladin, looking down at him expressionlessly. Those black eyes were just as piercing as the projectiles.
Kaladin forced himself to join Tesh on his feet. He wasn't done yet. "Help me get people to safety," he told Tesh.
Tesh cocked his head, then nodded once. He turned and jogged in the direction of a few fallen bodies in the leather and rags of bridgemen. They lay face down where they had been shot. Kaladin couldn't even tell if they were part of his crew.
He turned to grab another body himself. It was Teft, teeth gritted against the pain of an arrow whose point had buried itself in the flesh just above his hip. The shaft had snapped, but the stone head was buried deep.
"What are you storming doing, lad?" Teft growled as Kaladin grabbed him and forced him to his feet. He offered his own shoulder to keep the man's weight off his injured side, despite the protestations of his aching muscles.
"Saving your life," growled Kaladin.
"You're not saving a storming thing," Teft snapped. "I can't possibly carry the bridge like this."
"We can worry about that later," Kaladin said. "Right now, we just have to survive."
He helped Teft to the cover of a hill in the irregular rock of the plateau. Several of the others were already hiding in a hollow beneath the small cliff. Kaladin sat Teft with his back against the rock face, then gave his wound a momentary glance. It was severe, but not severe enough that the few minutes Kaladin needed to find the rest of the crew would make a difference.
"I'll be back," he told Teft, then turned and almost ran into Tesh. The silent man was bent almost double as he jogged into the hollow, carrying a groaning figure on his back. It was Skar, an arrow buried between his eighth and ninth ribs. Kaladin's heart sank immediately. He couldn't be sure whether it had penetrated anything immediately lethal, but the odds weren't good.
"Lay him down on his back," Kaladin ordered. "Then go find everyone else. Anyone alive, bring them here, injured or not."
Tesh slowly lowered the groaning Skar to the stone, then gave him a stiff nod and sprinted back out, heedless of the arrows zipping overhead.
Kaladin knelt beside Skar, looking around at the other bridgemen. "Gadol," he said, pointing. "Go find me a knife. Amark, find a rockbud and break it open, then bring me its watergourd. Anyone have a flint and steel?"
"I do," Moash said.
"Get a fire going," Kaladin ordered him. "Use arrow shafts for tinder."
Orders given, he turned back to his patient. A red stain was spreading across Skar's side. His face was going pale, his eyes glazing over. There was not much hope for him, Kaladin knew, but if a lack of hope were an excuse to give up he'd be at the bottom of the Honor Chasm right now.
He tore open Skar's shirt, careful not to dislodge the shaft of the arrow. By its positioning, it might have pierced the man's liver, or it might have just missed by less than an inch. He couldn't be sure. Kaladin could at least thank his lucky stars that the arrow didn't seem to have broken the man's ribs on the way in—that meant he could apply pressure without worrying too much about driving shrapnel deeper into his flesh.
He quickly stripped off his shirt and vest. He rolled up one corner of the vest and put it between Skar's teeth. The shirt he quickly bundled into a thick pad. Then, moving as quickly as he dared, he closed one hand around the shaft of the arrow. As he tugged it free, he pressed into the wound with the shirt.
The shirt went red alarmingly quickly. Skar screamed into his makeshift gag. His glazed eyes suddenly went sharp and wild, like a rabid animal's. With surprising deliberation, he spat out the vest. His mouth opened, and he spoke in a harsh, rattling voice. "He dies, he lives, he dies again!" he rasped. "He is the bridge between what is and what cannot be, and where he forms the path, she comes! She comes in hunger, and she feasts!"
Then he fell back with a final exhalation, his eyes dull. Dead.
Kaladin staggered back, the shock of losing a patient knocking him just as off-balance as it always did. He was snapped out of it, however, when Tesh returned. The man was somehow supporting a limping Bisig on one shoulder while carrying a limp Murk over the other. Kaladin leapt to his feet and helped him get the two injured men onto the ground.
Bisig's injury wasn't severe—at least not by bridgeman standards. He had been shot in the thigh, and the arrow had embedded itself deep and then splintered. The bleeding wasn't too bad, but the man's face was a rictus of pain. Still, that was an injury Kaladin knew how to treat.
Murk, however, was pale and unconscious. Kaladin wasn't immediately sure why. There was a wound on the outside of his chest, just below his shoulder, which didn't seem to be bleeding too badly. Kaladin tore aside that part of the man's shirt, wondering if he was bleeding internally. He was, but not severely enough to knock him out.
Tesh stood up again once the men were lowered.
"Is there anyone else?" Kaladin asked him.
The silent man raised a single finger, then turned and dashed from the hollow again.
Kaladin looked around, doing a quick head count. Six dead, then, counting poor Skar—assuming the final man Tesh had seen was still alive when they returned. Kaladin was horrified to find that, in the haze of his exhaustion, he couldn't immediately remember which faces were missing from the hollow.
Rather than let that distract him, he focused on what he could do. "Gadol," he said, "heat that knife in the fire. Amark, give me that gourd."
As he took the sloshing sac from Amark, he turned his attention to Murk. On a hunch, he reached his hand around the back of the man's head. Yes—there was a large lump growing on the back of his skull. Murk had been in the front row. He must have fallen, then been trampled by the rest of the crew as they ran.
There was nothing Kaladin could immediately do for a head injury, so he moved on to Teft. His face fell as he looked at the older man. Teft's eyes were closed, and his skin had gone a few shades lighter. For a moment, Kaladin didn't understand—the arrowhead in Teft's side shouldn't have been bleeding that severely.
Then he noticed the blood seeping from an entirely different wound in the man's opposite arm. The arrow seemed to have dug through as much flesh as it possibly could as it passed through, and then hadn't even stayed present to slow the bleeding. The gash in Teft's upper arm was wide, deep, and pouring blood.
Kaladin dashed over. "Gadol, that knife!"
He took the hilt from Gadol—for something heated on a makeshift campfire in such difficult conditions, Gadol had managed to get the blade impressively hot. He tore away Teft's shirt, and moved as quickly as he could.
First, clean the wound. He poured the liquid from the watergourd onto the wound, rinsing it as thoroughly as he could while being mindful of how little time Teft might have if he kept bleeding. The liquid smelt slightly bitter, but he knew from his lessons that a rockbud's watergourd was reliably sanitary.
Next, cauterize. The hot knife steamed as it pressed against the wound. The man didn't react.
"You," Kaladin said, barely even conscious of his own voice, "will not die. Not today. Not now."
He tied a tourniquet around Teft's shoulder, as tight as he could under the circumstances, then pulled out his needle and thread and began to stitch.
Tesh returned silently as he worked. He spared a quick glance to see who he had brought. It was Arik—wounded, but not severely. There were gashes along his right arm and left leg where arrows had clipped him, but nothing life-threatening. Kaladin tossed the roll of bandages to Tesh, then held out the watergourd to him. "Wash the wounds, then tie those around them," he ordered, already looking back at Teft's much more severe injuries. "Tightly. Don't use more than you need, and give me back what you don't use. I need the rest."
Tesh didn't reply, of course, but nor did anyone else. All around Kaladin, the hollow was silent. Twenty-six bridgemen watched as he did all he could to save Teft's life.
The bleeding slowed. By the time Kaladin had backed away from Teft's wounds, the bandage on his arm had soaked through and been replaced—but the replacement was holding.
Someone groaned behind him. He turned sharply.
Murk was stirring, clutching his head. Kaladin felt the relief break over him like sweat after a fever. He dashed over and gave Murk a portion from the watergourd to drink, then moved on.
The wound in Bisig's leg didn't need to be cauterized. Kaladin washed it with most of what remained in the watergourd, picked out the splinters, then stitched it closed and bandaged over it.
Finally, he was finished. He leaned back, mind numb. Four injured men, treated as best he could manage. And, he reminded himself, glancing over at Skar's corpse, one patient he had failed.
Tesh knelt beside him. Kaladin couldn't even muster the energy to look at him, to try to read his intentions in his face and gestures.
He did look, however, when he felt something nudge his arm. He glanced down to see that Tesh was prodding him with the watergourd. Kaladin blinked down at it for a moment, then reached down and took it. The liquid was bitter, but it was also cool and fresh. "Thanks," he said.
Tesh nodded.
Kaladin looked around, trying to remember faces and names. Six of Bridge Four were dead today, assuming Teft survived. Jaks, he remembered. Adis. Corl. Koorm. Dabbid.
And, of course, Skar.
He slumped down into the hollow.
"Where did you learn to be a healer?" Sigzil asked quietly.
Kaladin looked up and saw the small Azish man staring at him with something like awe. Many of the bridgemen were looking at him with similar expressions on their faces. "I wasn't always a slave," Kaladin said, voice rasping through his exhausted throat.
"These things you have done, they will not matter," Rock said, but it wasn't spoken with belligerence or bitterness. He sounded almost mournful. "We must leave behind wounded who cannot walk. Gaz makes it so. Orders from above."
"I'll deal with Gaz," said Kaladin. He turned the knife in his hands and handed it, hilt first, to Gadol. "Take this back wherever you found it," he said. "I don't want to be accused of looting."
The battle was long, but it eventually came to an end. Kaladin heard the Alethi soldiers shouting their victory. He wondered what it might be like to care who won in a battle like this. It was all he could do to force himself to his feet and go find Gaz. The arrows had stopped flying, but they would be here a while yet while the soldiers pounded against the chasmfiend's chrysalis.
Those chrysalises, Kaladin had learned, were the reason for every brutal bridge run. The chasmfiends emerged from the canyons and formed these shells around themselves. It was in this vulnerable state that both the Alethi and the Parshendi could attempt to harvest the massive emerald gemhearts inside them, which were large enough that soulcasters using them could produce enough grain to feed whole regiments.
Kaladin had spent years wanting to come to the Shattered Plains, to fight in the honorable war of the Vengeance Pact against the Parshendi. Now that he was finally here, he knew the truth. The entire War of Reckoning was little more than a vanity project, allowing highprinces to grow wealthy off the backs and blood of darkeyed slaves.
Kaladin shook the thoughts off. Gaz was standing well behind where the battle lines had been, head casting this way and that as though trying to keep his one eye on everyone around him. He glanced over as Kaladin approached. "Lot of blood for one man," he commented. "How much of it's yours?"
Kaladin looked down at himself, suddenly conscious of all the blood that had soaked into his clothes after nearly an hour of intense medical work. He didn't bother to answer Gaz's question. "We're taking our injured with us."
"No, you're not," Gaz grunted. "If they can't walk, they stay behind. Not my choice—orders from above."
"I wasn't asking."
Gaz's one eyebrow rose. "Brightlord Lamaril won't stand for it."
"Brightlord Lamaril will be in the front of the column," Kaladin said. "He won't want to miss the victory celebrations. You'll send Bridge Four last, and he doesn't have to see our injured. We'll keep pace with the other bridges." He pulled out his last sphere, the last of the clearmarks Gaz had paid him that very morning. He had spent the rest on the medical supplies he'd used to keep his men alive today. "You'll keep this between us."
"One clearmark?" Gaz sneered, though not until after he'd taken the sphere. "You think I'd risk—"
"If you don't," Kaladin interrupted, "I'll kill you, and let them execute me."
Gaz started. "You wouldn't—"
Kaladin took a step forward. It wasn't a deliberate intimidation. It was just that, if he did have to leave his men behind after so much effort to save them, he didn't think surviving was worth letting Gaz live.
Suddenly, there was a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. Tesh. Gaz bared his teeth. "That's right, Dullard," he said. "You'd best—"
Tesh stepped past Kaladin. Suddenly, the man seemed taller than he had a few minutes ago, in the hollow beside the cliff. He seemed to tower over Gaz, his unkempt, prematurely-white hair billowing unnaturally in the faint breeze.
Gaz staggered back, one eye wide enough that a ring of white was visible around his dark irises. "Storm it, fine!" he said. "But if Brightlord Lamaril asks, I don't know a thing about it!"
"Fine," Kaladin said. It didn't matter.
Gaz's gaze darted down to the dark sphere in his hand. He made a derisive sound in the back of his throat. "And a dun sphere, at that," he said.
Kaladin turned and walked away. Tesh followed him.
Syl darted ahead of both of them. "I don't trust Gaz," she said. "He could easily say you threatened him and send people after you."
Tesh shook his head.
"You think?" Kaladin asked him.
Tesh held out his hand, two fingers and thumb extended like talons closed around a small object, then flicked them into a fist, as if pulling something close.
"He definitely wants my spheres," Kaladin agreed. "Badly. Maybe badly enough to keep him in line. Maybe not. We'll see."
Tesh nodded.
As they returned to the hollow, Kaladin's mind drifted. He hadn't kept his promise. Bridge Four had lost men under his watch. But Kaladin was getting used to breaking promises by now.
It was almost possible for him to convince himself that, just maybe, he had made a difference today. Maybe Teft would die tomorrow, but he had not died yet. Maybe all of them would die tomorrow, but they had not died yet. It was a cold comfort, but it was all he had, and Kaladin clutched it as tightly as Gaz had clutched that dun clearmark.
Thanks to Elran and @BeaconHill for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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7
Precognition
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The surviving humans on Ashyn have started using its power, much as humans on shardworlds use Investiture.
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"You realize, Brightlord, that you have now committed two entire battalions to patrolling?"
"Yes," said Renarin's father.
Brightlady Teshav pursed her lips. "That is in addition to the battalion already peacekeeping between the warcamps and in the markets," she said. "Over a quarter of your forces are standing by, Brightlord."
"I know. The orders stand, Teshav." Dalinar's voice was short but not annoyed, despite being questioned by a subordinate in his wartime decisions, and a woman at that. If anything, he sounded tired. "See to it. But first, head to the ledger room. I'll meet you there; we have more to discuss."
"Of course, Highprince," Teshav said, nodding respectfully before withdrawing.
Renarin leaned closer to his father. "She wasn't pleased about that."
"She wants me to send her husband out to fight," Dalinar said. "She hopes I'll win another Shardblade and give it to him."
He was probably right. Renarin was good at reading the emotions in people's faces, but not as good at attributing them correctly. He'd assumed Teshav had felt insulted that her advice was dismissed, but his father's assessment probably made more sense.
Dalinar led him into the royal palace. After five years out here on the Plains, Elhokar's royal court had come together astonishingly well. It couldn't hold a candle to the grand citadel at Kholinar, of course, but for a palace that had been hastily erected in one of the most hostile environments on Roshar, it had come together very well.
As they crossed the threshold, Glys darted ahead and hovered just in front of Renarin's face, keeping pace perfectly as they walked. It was something he did often. Renarin wondered how he maintained the exact distance between them so effortlessly. It wasn't as though Glys had legs with which to mirror Renarin's stride. Was it flight, the same as many other types of spren, and mere practice allowed him to so easily maintain a constant distance? Or was he anchoring himself to Renarin somehow, rather than being anchored to Roshar itself?
"Who do you think cut the strap on Elhokar's saddle?" Glys asked.
I don't know, Renarin said without moving his mouth. It was a skill he and Glys were practicing. The mistpren might be able to go invisible and inaudible, but Renarin was not so lucky. They might need to communicate in public situations, and Renarin's public image was far too tarnished already to survive being seen talking to himself. Glys couldn't read Renarin's mind, but he could receive thoughts Renarin deliberately projected to the very surface of his consciousness.
"I didn't get that," Glys said after a moment.
…It was still a work in progress.
Before Renarin could try again, his father spoke quietly at his side. "Son, I've been meaning to speak with you about the hunt last week."
Renarin couldn't suppress the twitch that went through his face, though he did manage to control the urge to flinch at the sudden anxiety that rose up from his gut like bile.
Dalinar didn't wait for a verbal reply. "You realize that rushing into battle like you did was reckless," he said. "You could have died."
"What would you have done if it had been me in danger?" Even as the words left his mouth, Renarin knew they were weak. He and his father were fundamentally different. Dalinar was a war hero, a soldier of peerless skill and incredible strength, a man about whom men whispered with awe and fear in equal measure. Renarin, meanwhile, was little more than the punchline to the cruelest joke of his father's life.
"I don't fault your bravery; I fault your wisdom." The words were spoken sternly, but kindly. They still cut like knives. "What if you'd had one of your fits?"
I wouldn't, Renarin thought. He hadn't had a seizure since bonding with Glys more than two weeks ago. While he had gone that long without suffering one in the past, it was rare—and Glys thought it was more likely that he had unconsciously healed his own blood-sickness using Stormlight. Renarin hadn't even realized that was a possibility.
But he couldn't exactly tell his devoutly Vorin father that his blood-sickness had been cured by his Knight Radiant magic. Even if Glys hadn't asked him to keep his powers secret for now. Renarin knew he should just accept the criticism gracefully and disengage, let the conversation end.
…But it hurt. It hurt to be dismissed again. It hurt to have it thrown in his face that even now, even when he had been chosen to be the first—one of the first, as Glys had corrected him—Knights Radiant in almost two thousand years… he was still the overlooked, unwanted outsider he'd always been.
"Then maybe the chasmfiend would have swept me off the plateau," Renarin found himself saying before he could reel the words back, "and I'd stop being such a waste of space."
Glys hummed his displeasure, darting right into Renarin's ear to make his disapproval known, even as his father spoke sharply. "Don't even joke about such things!"
"Was it a joke, Father?" Renarin asked, shaking his head slightly to dislodge his spren. It didn't work, of course. Glys was mostly incorporeal most of the time. "I can't fight."
His father, of course, repeated the same worthless platitude he always did. "Fighting is not the only thing of value a man can do."
Renarin's mouth twisted. He was so storming tired of people who only cared about warfare telling him it was perfectly fine that he wasn't capable of joining them in it. He tore his eyes from his father and set them forward, staring at nothing in particular. "You're right, of course," he said stiffly. "I'm not the first hero's son to be born without a talent for combat. The other's all managed; so will I. I'll probably end up as a citylord of some small town on the fringes, assuming I don't hide in the devotaries."
His father was silent for a moment. Renarin didn't look at him. Part of him wanted to see what was happening on his face; the rest of him couldn't bear to know. "Perhaps," Dalinar said after several long seconds, "it's time to try again."
Renarin blinked. "Try again?"
"To teach you the sword, son."
Renarin's resolve to keep his eyes front splintered. He blinked at his father, looking for any sign of a joke in his thoughtful expression, and found none. "But… my blood sickness—"
"Won't matter if we get you into Plate and give you a Blade," Dalinar said.
"Father," Renarin said, "I'll never be a Shardbearer. You said yourself that any we recover from the Parshendi have to go to the most skilled warriors we have."
"None of the other highprinces have given up their spoils to the king," said his father, with a wry curl to his lips. "And who would fault me if I made a gift to my son?"
Renarin stared at him. "You're serious?"
"I swear to you, son," Dalinar said with surprising firmness. "If I can capture another Blade and Plate, they go to you." Suddenly, the old warrior grinned. "To be honest, I'd do it just to see the look on Sadeas' face."
Renarin couldn't help but smile too.
"Sorry to bring a highstorm through your parade, Renarin," said Glys quietly, "but I don't think it would be a good idea for you to bond a conventional Shardblade."
Renarin blinked at the spren. Why not?
Glys hesitated for a moment before answering. "I suspect that it would have… unpleasant interactions with our bond. For both of us."
You suspect?
"There haven't exactly been many Radiants since the Recreance for me to check against," Glys protested.
Why wouldn't you be able to research Radiants from before the Recreance, then?
Glys drew back suddenly, as if in surprise. "...Oh," he said. "Of course, you wouldn't know."
Know what?
There was a beat of silence. Then, "Very few of the spren who had ever bonded Knights Radiant survived the Recreance," said Glys. "I don't have anyone to ask about Radiants wielding Shardblades before that point."
That made sense. But… What don't I know, Glys?
Glys didn't answer for a long moment. Then, "If you said something, it didn't go through."
Renarin sighed and let the matter drop. He'd ask Glys about it later, when he could just ask the question instead of having to project it.
A few minutes later, they joined Teshav among the ledgers. She had already started, finding the most recent books among the dusty shelves and opening them to those records relevant to House Kholin's finances. Or so Renarin assumed.
"We have got to teach you to read," Glys said.
No, Renarin replied immediately.
"Why not?"
Oh, that had gotten through? I'm already barely a man by my father's standards, Renarin said. I'd rather not be even more of an embarrassment to my family.
"You're not an embarrassment to your family, Renarin." Glys' voice was soft, his tone kind. It stung the way pity always did.
I disagree, Renarin said. And so would most of Alethkar.
"Who cares about most of Alethkar?" asked Glys. "Your actual family doesn't agree. Adolin doesn't think you're a disappointment. Dalinar doesn't think you're a disappointment."
Elhokar does, Renarin said.
"No, he doesn't," Glys said firmly.
How would you know? You've seen him maybe twice.
"There are things I can't tell you, Renarin, but trust me—there is exactly one member of your family that Elhokar views as a disappointment, and it's not you."
Then who? Renarin asked. Surely not Adolin.
Glys didn't answer. Renarin shot him a quick, quizzical look, but the mistspren was as impassive as a floating red crystal dripping crimson droplets upward could hope to be. "If you said something," Glys said, "I didn't get it."
Damnation. With a sigh, Renarin turned his attention to Teshav's ledgers. In this, at least, he could probably make himself useful.
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Hours later, they finally left the musty ledger room and turned towards Elhokar's throne room. Work on the palace, Renarin noticed, was still continuing—stonemasons were actively carving out a new relief along one of the walls as they passed.
"Which Herald is that supposed to be?" Glys asked, darting over to the half-completed scene.
Nalan'Elin, Renarin said.
"Oh. The Skybreaker." Glys spoke the word as one might refer to a particularly persistent stray hound. "Right."
Not a fan of the Skybreakers? Renarin asked. Weren't they also an order of Knights Radiant?
"They were," Glys said. "But highspren and mistspren have never really gotten along. Especially not lately. And I have specific reasons to dislike highspren dogma even more than most."
Care to share?
Glys paused. "I should," he said, and he sounded guilty. "You've trusted me so far, and there's still so much you don't know." He sighed. "We really need to teach you to read. There's a book that should have a lot of answers for you."
I can just get someone to read it to me, Renarin said. What's the book?
"The Mythica. By someone named Hessi, I think. It's sort of a compilation on some of the myths of the old Desolations." He paused. "It's specifically about the Unmade."
The what?"
"Nine extremely powerful spren who served the enemy during the Desolations," said Glys. "I—look, I'll tell you later, when we have actual privacy, all right?
They passed Highprince Ruthar on the way in and found Renarin's cousin on his balcony. He turned to them as they approached and gave Renarin's father a respectful—almost deferential—nod. His eyes glided over Renarin as though he wasn't even there.
"Do you think they watch us?" Elhokar asked, glancing back out the window. "From out there on the Plains."
"I can only assume that they do, Your Majesty," said Dalinar. Renarin saw his eyes dart up and down Elhokar's body, something disapproving in the furrow of his brow. But Renarin couldn't guess as to what.
"You look thoughtful, Uncle," Elhokar said. Renarin glanced his way and saw the glint of displeasure in his eyes. Had he also seen whatever Renarin had? Maybe he had a better idea what it meant.
"Just contemplating the past, Your Majesty."
"The past is irrelevant," said Elhokar, and Renarin saw how his eyes flickered to something in the back of the room momentarily. They returned to Dalinar's face reluctantly. "I only look forward."
Mmm, lies, said Glys in Renarin's mind. There was something odd in his voice, a lilting amusement, as though he was imitating something. He chuckled to himself, but whatever the joke was, Renarin didn't get it.
He also wasn't coming out the way he usually did when he spoke to Renarin. Why are you hiding? Renarin asked, gingerly putting his hand into his pocket. His finger brushed Glys' crystalline surface—a feeling they only encountered when the mistspren made himself deliberately corporeal.
You're getting better at hiding when you're talking to me, but you're not perfect yet, said Glys. Someone who knows what to look for might be able to tell I'm here if they saw you look at me. Someone like another spren.
Renarin blinked, trying to keep his expression under control. There's another intelligent spren here?
Yes. Don't ask any more details, I can't tell you.
Why not? Renarin asked, hoping he didn't sound as petulant as he feared.
Oaths, Glys said. Humans aren't the only ones who swear them. The bond of a spren with its chosen Radiant is a sacred thing, one of the last sacred things, and those of us who remember all swore not to interfere with one another's.
Renarin stared at Elhokar. He and Dalinar were arguing about the strategy for the war and the feasibility of continuing the Vengeance Pact. Renarin wasn't listening for any details. My cousin is a Knight Radiant, he said.
I can neither confirm nor deny that a spren is scoping out your cousin, said Glys. Nor can I confirm or deny that, if one was, it would clearly not have managed to form a true Nahel bond at this point. If there were another Radiant spren in this room, it would probably be trying to convince him to say the First Ideal. And, if I had to wildly speculate on this complete hypothetical, doing a thoroughly terrible job at it.
Renarin had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. It wasn't often he was turned towards outbursts of emotion, let alone laughter, but somehow Glys' dry, sarcastic monologues reached him in whatever dark crevice his sense of humor lived. And if you had to speculate on, as you say, this completely unfounded hypothetical, Renarin said, why do you think this hypothetical spren would be doing so badly at forming a hypothetical Nahel bond with my hypothetical cousin?
There's nothing hypothetical about your cousin, Glys pointed out. He very specifically exists, Elhokar Kholin. He chuckled. I shouldn't answer your question, but you're a Truthwatcher, and the only thing worse than me telling you would be you poking it yourself out of curiosity. Promise me you'll leave this to sort itself out?
I promise, said Renarin.
This hypothetical spren is probably a Cryptic, said Glys. Or, as some call them, a liespren. They're attracted to people who compartmentalize or bury parts of themselves in one way or another. The moment I saw your cousin, I thought he'd be a great fit for a Lightweaver.
And why would that make the spren bad at forming Nahel bonds? Renarin asked.
Oh, Cryptics are all stupid, said Glys. Well, no, that's uncharitable. Better to say they have a few very bad habits. Specifically, when they see a person with an obvious flaw or flaws, they would much rather poke it than avoid it. Your cousin has a tendency towards paranoia, and I can't imagine seeing a creepy shape sliding across the walls in the corner of his vision is helping things.
Renarin frowned. That's… cruel.
I agree, Glys said. To be fair, they would put what they do very differently. But Cryptics are not kind. They're not malicious, either. They treat each other like that, too. Relationships are a science to them, to be deconstructed and examined. Often, this causes friction between the Cryptics and their prospective Radiants. Or the Cryptics and their bonded Radiants. Or the Cryptics and the other spren. Or the Cryptics and the other Cryptics.
Renarin hesitated. Shouldn't we… help, then?
Depends what you mean, Glys said. If you mean 'should we' as in, would it be better for Elhokar if we did? Possibly. Depends how it went. We might just as easily spook him into never bonding his Cryptic, and that would be bad. But if you mean 'should we' in the non-hypothetical, 'let's talk to Elhokar Kholin about his potential spren as soon as possible' way, then the answer is no.
Why not?
Because you promised you wouldn't poke it, Glys said firmly. And so did I. The Nahel bond is sacred, remember?
I'm not even sure I know what that means, Renarin said. And it's not as though we're stopping him from creating a Nahel bond.
No, we'd just be allowing the bond to be founded on a broken base, said Glys. The Radiant and their spren have to approach each other, Renarin. Naturally, without being forced or coerced, or even encouraged from outside. Otherwise, the Nahel bond ends up weaker.
I don't understand why, Renarin said. If the Nahel bond is just a manifestation of our oaths, why does it matter the circumstances under which we say them?
Glys sighed. You're getting into some pretty deep Radiant philosophy, he said. Some of which I simply don't know. You're my first Radiant, remember. Almost every mistspren who ever had one died at the Recreance.
But you do know something, Renarin said. Or you wouldn't be trying to keep me from talking to Elhokar.
Something, yes. Not much. Look, in the old days, the oaths of the Knights Radiant were generally known. Some of the higher Ideals were kept secret within their particular Order, but the First Ideal was widely known all over Roshar, and so were a lot of the Second and Third Ideals. Do you think that means that everyone who said the First Ideal in the presence of a Radiant spren formed a Nahel bond?
No, Renarin said. It has to be reciprocal, right? You have to believe we mean it.
Precisely, said Glys. So imagine you're a spren who's scoping out a potential Radiant. Then a third party barges in, tells your human about you, and gives him the information he needs to say the First Ideal. Would you trust your human's sincerity when he said it?
Renarin's heart sank. It breaks the foundation of the spren's trust, he realized. But you said the Ideals were commonly known?
They were. It was a problem, or so I've heard. A lot of spren had trouble learning to trust their Radiants. I know for a fact that quite a few inkspren didn't see First-Ideal Knights as real Radiants at all. That was more of a trial period. This is also why squires became so common—the entourage of a Radiant of the higher Ideals can draw a measure of power from the Radiant's Nahel bond without finding a spren of their own. It gives the other spren a chance to observe them, see their potential.
And that mistrust will have only gotten worse after the Recreance, Renarin said.
Exactly. Even if this Cryptic—which may or may not exist—did decide to bond Elhokar after you revealed yourself to him, it might not commit itself completely to the bond. Which would stunt Elhokar's growth as a Radiant.
Renarin sighed. I understand.
Of course you do, said Glys. You're a Truthwatcher. You wouldn't stop asking questions until you did.
Renarin's lips twitched upwards.
"…Let us part ways, then." Elhokar stood up. Renarin blinked, coming back to the other humans in the room. "It's growing late, and I must speak with Ruthar."
Renarin's father nodded. "Farewell, then, Your Majesty," he said. Then he turned and started from the room, glancing once at Renarin to be sure he was following. After a quick nod to Elhokar—which the King ignored—Renarin did.
It wasn't until they had left the palace entirely that Glys darted out of Renarin's pocket. "It is far too cramped in there," he complained. "We should invest in a better alternative, Renarin."
What would you suggest? Renarin asked as he hurried after his father in the direction of the stable. A knapsack? I'd look very odd, the Highprince's son carrying a soldier's pack around with him.
"There is a spectrum of spaciousness between the polar extremes of tiny pocket and giant sack," said Glys. "I'm not asking for much. Just a satchel. Or even clothes with larger pockets."
Dalinar leapt astride his massive Ryshadium, Gallant. In the stall beside him, Renarin mounted his own horse. My pockets are no smaller than everyone else's, he pointed out.
"This is why the Alethi have no Radiants," Glys said. "It has nothing to do with the Recreance and everything to do with your tiny pockets."
Renarin snorted, shaking his head at Glys as they cantered out of the stable. Then he stopped, squinting as he looked eastward. Was that—
Oh, no.
Glys rotated, following his gaze. Oh, he said. Oh, Mother mine.
"Father," Renarin called, unable to keep his voice from shaking.
A highstorm was coming.
Dalinar turned back to look at him. Renarin just pointed.
"Was there supposed to be a storm today?" Dalinar asked sharply.
"Elthebar didn't think so," said Renarin. "But he's not always right."
"The highstorms used to be more predictable," said Glys. "Back when the Stormfather was just the Stormfather, and not whatever the Damnation he is now."
Not the time, Glys.
"Fair enough."
"Should we go to Aladar's camp?" Renarin asked aloud. Highprince Aladar's warcamp was near enough that the sentries could probably hear them talking.
Dalinar hesitated. Renarin knew exactly what he was thinking. They'll see me having an episode. They'll see me at my weakest. A shameful satisfaction bubbled up in Renarin, and guilt followed hot on its heels. Then the man's face hardened. "We ride!" he called back, turning and spurring Gallant onward.
"Father!" Renarin called, already nudging his horse into a gallop after him. "Are you sure?"
"We have enough time!" his father shouted.
They almost made it.
As they passed the checkpoint at the edge of the Kholin warcamp, Renarin glanced back at the stormwall. He knew immediately it was too close. "Father!"
Dalinar looked back at him, then at the wall of wind and rain less than a quarter mile from them. "We can make it," he said, and Renarin realized with a start of horror that his father was panicking. "We can—"
Renarin caught his arm. "Father," he said, lowering his voice the way Jasnah had always lowered hers when it all became too much for her little cousin. "I'm sorry."
His father gritted his teeth and dismounted. They passed their reins to one of the last soldiers outside, then darted into a stone barrack. The doors thudded shut behind them. The only light was a pale red glow from garnet-lamps mounted on the walls.
Dalinar Kholin breathed heavily. Renarin could see the tension in every line of his body. He knew that feeling—the dread, the sense that he was speeding towards something he could not control, could not stop—
Renarin, Glys said.
Dalinar's expression froze. His eyes glazed over.
Renarin, Glys said.
Renarin pointed at the four soldiers nearest his father. "Hold him," he ordered.
"What?" the highest ranked of the men, a captain with pale blue eyes, blinked at him. "Brightlord—"
"My father," Renarin said, trying with all his might to sound authoritative. "Hold—"
Dalinar moved. Renarin flinched, but it was a small motion, this time—he startled, staring down at something only he could see against his hip. Then his face seemed to soften. He spoke something in a language Renarin couldn't understand.
Renarin, Glys said.
"What?" Renarin snapped. It was only when the soldiers turned to him that he realized he'd spoken aloud. "Hold him," he ordered, no longer caring whether he looked as regal and imposing as a highprince's son should. "He's not moving too much yet, but he—"
Dalinar dove to the side, almost bowling over another man. Finally, the guards moved, closing their hands around him as he thrashed.
Renarin, Glys said.
What is it, Glys!? Renarin roared silently.
I need you to find somewhere quiet to sit, Glys said.
What? But— Renarin stopped. He recognized the tone of Glys' voice.
Adolin, he remembered saying, I think I need somewhere quiet to sit for a minute.
No, he whispered.
I'm so sorry, Glys said. I don't know what this is. I'm holding it back, but I can't hold it long. I need you to sit down and close your eyes.
Renarin realized his hands were shaking. He looked down at them, then up at the sergeant in command of this barrack. "I am having a fit," he said, keeping his voice perfectly steady. "The stress."
The sergeant looked at him with pity. For once, Renarin didn't care at all.
"I will be safe," he said. "I just need to be left alone for a few minutes. My father may be more violent. Keep him safe, please."
"Of course, Brightlord," said the sergeant.
Renarin turned and marched to the nearest corner. He sat down with his back nestled in it, tucked his chin into his knees, and breathed out. His eyes slid shut.
"I'm ready," he whispered.
I'm sorry, said Glys.
Renarin didn't hear him.
Blood-red lightning flashed. A storm hung suspended in the lurid sky, spearing down with a hundred streaks of power. The bolts crackled in the air like pillars of crystalline light, perfectly still, converging on a single man. He knelt on the edge of a chasm, screaming loudly enough to tear the flesh of his own throat.
You cannot hold me back forever, said a voice as resonant as the wind and as terrible as the lightning. You are not strong enough.
The man's screams only grew louder.
The vision changed.
A great beast, with two massive wings of leathery membrane stretched over a skeletal frame, stared down at a man in robes of red and gold. She was scaled like a fish; a million tiny plates of emerald stretching over a body the size of a chasmfiend. She stood across a threshold, barring the man's way. His eyes flashed with fury beneath a crown with three empty sockets.
"You would stand against me?" asked the man in the same awful voice as the storm. It sounded like rocks scraping against one another. "You stand against your very nature."
"Yes," said the scaled beast in a woman's voice. She said something else, but the words were suddenly distorted and incomprehensible.
When the man spoke again, it was clear. "Then you will die," he said, and in his hand was a spiked warhammer of black metal. He struck.
She died.
The vision changed.
A river of fire wound its way through a blasted landscape. The sky boiled overhead. A city sparkled in the distance, contained within a protective bubble of pale blue.
Two men stood atop ruined ground, their backs to the city, staring out at an oncoming storm whose rain was liquid flame. There was a shape in that storm, twisted and unnerving, its appearance shifting between horrible, indescribable forms.
One of the men bore a pale blue Shardblade, though the length of its hilt made it look almost like a short spear. He wore a uniform of Kholin blue. His unkempt hair whipped around his face in a wind only he could feel. "There are worse places to die," he said.
"And worse men to die beside," said his companion. He wore robes which shifted in a thousand scintillating colors, and leaned heavily upon a silvery staff.
Renarin blinked and the world came back into focus. He breathed deeply in silence for a moment.
Renarin? Glys murmured.
"I'm here, Glys," Renarin whispered back, too exhausted to try to project mentally.
I'm so, so sorry, Glys said. I knew you might be able to see the future eventually. I never imagined it would manifest like this.
"That was the future?" Renarin asked.
Yes, Glys said. And… well, it doesn't look good.
"I didn't really understand it," Renarin admitted.
I'd expect not; you're missing context. But we can talk more later, when we have more privacy, I don't think this is the time or place.
"No, probably not." Renarin stood up on shaking legs. His father was yelling in the same language he'd been speaking in before Renarin's vision, but he was no longer thrashing about. Renarin staggered over and found that with each step, his strength was returning.
"Brightlord," greeted the sergeant with a grimace.
"How is he?" Renarin asked.
"He stopped moving so much about a minute ago," said the sergeant. "Does that mean he'll wake soon?"
"It might," said Renarin.
As if on cue, Dalinar's speech suddenly became comprehensible. He was shouting in Alethi. "What sort of answer is that?" he roared, suddenly struggling against the hands holding him again. Then he froze. He blinked, and his eyes cleared. He looked at the shoulders holding him down, then at Renarin. He took a slow breath.
"My mind is clear again," he said. "You can let me go. It's all right."
The sergeant glanced at Renarin. He nodded, and the men hesitantly let his father go.
Slowly, Dalinar Kholin stood up. "Thank you," he said, and Renarin wasn't sure whether he was speaking to him or to the soldiers.
Just in case, Renarin nodded, but his mind wasn't really on his father or the other people in the room. Now that Dalinar's fit had ended, his thoughts were drifting back to his own.
Thanks to Elran and @BeaconHill for betareading, and to Phinnia for the commissioned icon.
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8
The Old Bitterness
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However, this power does not derive from a Shard. It does not appear to be Investiture at all.
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Sarus ignored the eyes of the other bridgemen as he swung his legs over the side of his bunk. A few of them glanced his way as he moved, but most of them kept their eyes fixed upon their enigmatic new bridgeleader.
Kaladin was awake. Sarus could tell by the occasional hitches in his breathing, the soft groan he let out as he rolled onto his side. But he didn't rise. Sarus found himself watching with just as much attention as the rest of the crew. Had the previous day been a one-time miracle, never to be repeated? Or would Kaladin rise and face today with the same impossible determination as the day before?
A single twining ribbon rose up from the ground by Sarus' feet, drifting slightly in the faint breeze coming in through the cracked door. Sarus blinked at it, surprised. He had not summoned an anticipationspren in almost five years.
With a sudden movement, as if trying to outrun his own exhaustion, Kaladin threw off his blanket and stood up. He looked at the row of faces turned his way, then caught Sarus' gaze.
Sarus nodded at him. He wasn't sure what he even meant, but he was sure that a nod was the right way to say it.
Kaladin's lip twitched, though whether it was in the direction of a smile or a frown, Sarus couldn't say. A single painspren faded into being, reaching towards Kaladin's hip, before fading away again. He didn't even notice it.
With a grunt, Kaladin stumped past Sarus and the rest of the watching bridgemen, moving towards the front of the barrack and the wounded men laid up there. He quickly examined the most severely injured of them—the older man who had monopolized Kaladin's efforts the previous day. Sarus saw his expression soften in relief. It appeared the man was still alive.
Four injured bridgemen. In all Sarus' time running the bridges, he had never seen such a thing in the barracks before.
Kaladin moved on to the other men. One of them clasped his hand as he approached.
"Thank you, sir," he said. "Before you, I'd have been left out there."
Kaladin's lips twitched again, as though he felt he ought to smile but couldn't quite remember how. "Rest, Bisig," he ordered. "Keep that leg clean. Let me know if you see any rotspren—they look like tiny red insects. I'll bring you food and water from the mess."
"Yes, sir," said the man. Bisig, Sarus supposed. "Thank you, sir."
Kaladin turned then to look at the man whose wounds Sarus had bandaged. He seemed to be recovering well. He even tried to stand up when Kaladin approached him before Kaladin held out a hand to forestall him. "Not until I've had a look," he said, pushing the man back down onto his cot and gently tugging his arm up to examine his wounds. After a moment, he nodded to himself. "Rest today," he said. "We can try some supervised light activity in the afternoon, and if all goes well you'll be able again in two or three days."
"Able to run the bridge," grunted the man. "Joy."
Kaladin let out a breath. "I'll let you know when I figure out a way to get us out of bridge runs."
The injured man snorted, but Sarus doubted Kaladin was joking. The bridgeleader moved on to the last man—the one who had been trampled by the crew. He was awake, but he didn't look happy about it.
"You s-some sort of-of surgeon?" he asked, his voice stuttering oddly.
"Some sort," said Kaladin. "Tell me what you're feeling."
"Ca-can't seem to sp-speak prop-per," said the man, wincing in mingled pain and frustration. "And m-my head is st-still killing me."
"Those sorts of symptoms usually go away on their own," Kaladin said. "Not much I can do about them, I'm afraid, but you can expect to get better over the next few days. Have you been outside yet this morning?"
"No."
"Try when you feel up to it," Kaladin said. "You may be more sensitive to light and sound than you're used to. That should also go away on its own."
"I'll t-take your w-word for it," stuttered the man. Then, almost begrudgingly, "Th-thank you, s-sir."
Kaladin just nodded. He stood still for a moment, as though mentally readying himself, then turned and stomped out of the barracks.
Sarus stared after him for a moment.
"Do you suppose he intends to drill again today?" asked Archive from his shoulder, her voice barely a whisper on the breeze. She was still no larger than a speck of dust.
Sarus hesitated for a moment. In the corner of his vision, he saw Syl, Kaladin's honorspren, drifting around the barrack among the other men.
"Absolutely storming mad, that man," said someone.
"You're not lying," said another, sounding darkly amused.
Sarus felt his upper lip curling. He forced the displeasure down into the same void that had eaten all his anger and grief these past five years, then strode out of the barracks after Kaladin.
Syl drifted beside him, her form clarifying into a blue girl again. "You don't like it when they talk about Kaladin like that," she observed. "Do you?"
Sarus shrugged with one shoulder—the one Archive wasn't riding on.
"Do you ever speak?" Syl asked.
Sarus shook his head.
"Huh." Syl seemed to regard that as a curiosity. Then she shrugged and sped away, following Kaladin toward the lumberyard.
Sarus joined them.
Inside the yard, a small team of carpenters was already working on a half-finished bridge. Kaladin began stretching just outside, and Sarus joined in. Sometimes he copied stretches and exercises he did not recognize as Kaladin moved through them. Other times, he did know them—remembered them from days spent training beneath blue skies and forest-green banners.
Then, once their muscles were looser, he and Kaladin found a length of wood and began running it up and down the barracks again. There was a tightness in Kaladin's expression, a diamond-hardness that Sarus couldn't understand. Sure, he was jogging with Kaladin, carrying the same weight on his shoulders, but in five years on these crews he had never come out to do this himself. What was it in Kaladin that gave him the strength to do this? To seek this out? To take this harder road, when he could just idle in the barrack with the rest of the men, or throw himself into the chasm like so many before?
Sarus didn't understand it. And even as he followed Kaladin, even as he felt he could keep following Kaladin as long as the man survived the bridge, he felt an old bitterness rising up in him. The same bile that had landed him here in the first place, galling him once again.
What made Kaladin so much more than other men?
And why am I always less?
"You two!" Gaz's voice called from across the yard.
They slowed to a stop. Gaz was jogging in their direction from across the lumberyard, coming from the direction of the warcamp. Following Kaladin's lead, Sarus lowered the plank to the ground, then stepped back as his bridgeleader folded his arms, waiting for the overseer to speak.
"I've got news for you," said Gaz. "Brightlord Lamaril heard about what you did."
"How?" Kaladin asked sharply.
Gaz scoffed. "Storms, you think people wouldn't talk? I didn't even have to tell him—he'd already heard from at least three others by the time I saw him."
Kaladin sighed. "Fine. What does it matter? We didn't slow the army."
"No, but the Brightlord isn't keen on the idea of paying and feeding bridgemen who can't run bridges," said Gaz. "He asked the Highprince for leave to have you strung up."
Sarus' fists clenched involuntarily.
"And?" Kaladin asked woodenly.
"Brightlord Sadeas wouldn't let him do it," said Gaz.
Kaladin started. Sarus didn't. He already had a guess what was coming next.
I've never been much for commensurate punishment. Your death will be slower.
"Brightlord Sadeas," Gaz said, "told Lamaril to let you keep the soldiers, but to forbid them food or pay while they can't work. Said it'd show why he leaves bridgemen behind."
Sarus felt fury licking at him like a fire in his belly. It turned cold when it mingled with his grief, but it kept burning.
"Cremling," muttered Kaladin.
Gaz visibly paled. "That's your storming Highprince you're talking about, boy!"
"He's trying to make an example of my men," Kaladin growled. "Wants the rest to see the wounded suffer. Wants it to seem like a mercy to leave the wounded to die."
"Maybe he's right," said Gaz, but Sarus could tell he didn't believe it any more than Kaladin or Sarus did.
"He's not," said Kaladin flatly. "It's just cheaper to find new slaves than care for wounded ones." He sighed. "Thank you for bringing word to me."
"Bringing word?" Gaz sneered. "I was sent with orders for you, lordling. Don't try to get extra food from the mess hall for your wounded. Understood?"
"Understood," said Kaladin, but Gaz was already stomping off, muttering darkly to himself.
For a moment they were still, Sarus standing a bit behind Kaladin, the late morning breeze brisk as it brushed across their skin.
Then Kaladin sighed and turned to Sarus. "What am I going to do now, Tesh?" he asked.
Sarus shrugged. He didn't know, but he couldn't deny he was curious to find out.
"Where the Damnation am I going to find food for four men," Kaladin muttered, turning and starting back towards the barracks. "My rations aren't even enough to feed one more."
Sharing rations might work. Sarus tapped Kaladin's shoulder, then gestured to himself when the man looked up.
"You offering your rations too?" Kaladin asked.
Sarus nodded.
Kaladin sighed. It wasn't quite a sound of relief, but it was in that direction. "Thanks, Tesh," he said.
The two of them would not be enough, but they might be able to get one or two more people to help. That might be just enough.
As it turned out, it was.
"No ex-extra sensitivity, sir," the man with the head injury reported when they returned. "I th-think I'm physically all r-right."
"Good," Kaladin said, looking at him, then at the rest of the crew. "The cooks have been ordered not to provide food for the injured bridgemen," he announced. "Which means we have to share our rations with them." He nodded at the stuttering man. "Since you're able to move and walk like normal, Murk, you'll be able to get your own food. Arik should be able to do the same in just a couple days. Which just leaves Bisig and Teft. I want to pool our resources to buy medicine and get food for them—and Arik, until he's recovered. Who has something they can spare?"
The men stared at him. Then Moash began to laugh. A few other men joined him, until Sarus stepped forward, fixing his eyes on the man. Moash's laughter cut off with a faint choking sound as he stepped back, away from Sarus, blinking at him. The others who had joined in soon stopped too.
"Storms," Moash said, shaking his head. "I'm not giving up what little I have to throw food at men who're bound to die anyway."
You're just as much a dead man walking as they are, Sarus thought. What's one corpse's stomach over another's? But it wasn't worth saying.
"It could be you, next time," Kaladin said. "What'll you do when it's you that needs healing?"
"Die," said Moash. "Quickly, on the plateau, rather than over a week back here." He shot Sarus a quick glance before pushing past Kaladin and leaving the barrack.
Kaladin sighed.
"I'll h-help," said Murk quietly.
Kaladin blinked at him.
"If it-it won't slow m-my recovery," said Murk quickly.
"It won't," Kaladin promised. "Thanks, Murk."
"I have no spheres." The speaker was the large man whose place in line Kaladin had taken during the previous day's run. He approached slowly, walking with the singular focus of a man trying to convince himself, with every step, that he was walking in the direction he wanted to go. "But I will give some food."
Kaladin blinked up at him.
"But not for the dying one," the Horneater added, pointing at the unconscious, older man. "He will die. Is certain. Other two may recover. For them, you may have some of my food."
"Thank you, Rock," said Kaladin. A small smile had spread across his lips. It was one of the first such expressions Sarus had seen in a very long time.
Rock shrugged. "You took my place," he said. "I would be dead if you had not."
Kaladin's smile twisted in wry amusement. "I'm not dead, Rock. You'd have been fine."
Sarus shook his head.
"No," Rock said, nodding in Sarus' direction in agreement. "I'd be dead. Is something strange about you. Whole crew can see it, even if they don't want to speak of it. I looked at bridge where you were. Both of you." He glanced between Sarus and Kaladin. "Arrows hit all around you, but they do not hit you."
"Luck," said Kaladin.
"Is not so much luck in all of Roshar," said Rock dryly. "Besides, there is mafah'liki who always follows you." The Horneater bowed his head reverently in Syl's direction, making a strange gesture with his hand.
"You can see her?" Kaladin asked, glancing at Syl, then at Sarus. The honorspren seemed surprised, so she hadn't deliberately appeared to Rock any more than she had to Sarus.
"See wh-who?" Murk asked, blinking a foot or so behind where Syl was standing in midair. "What are y-you all talking about?"
Kaladin visibly hesitated. "Syl?" he asked.
Style shrugged, and suddenly Murk's eyes snapped to her.
He started. "What?—Ow." He winced, rubbing his head.
Kaladin grimaced. "Try to minimize sudden head movements," he said. "Your brain is bruised, and while you shouldn't make it any worse with small jerks like that, it might hurt."
"Y-yeah, you don't say," grunted Murk, with one eye screwed shut and the other narrowed at Syl. "What am I l-looking at?"
"This is Syl," said Kaladin. "She… follows me around."
"How do you know you're not following me around?" Syl asked.
Kaladin blinked. "Because I'm a slave? I don't have the right of travel. I don't choose where I go. You do."
"Oh," Syl said. There was a complicated expression on her face. "I—I knew I didn't like you being a slave, but it never—I didn't think about it like that."
"Ishi's r-receding hairline, it t-talks," Murk said.
"Excuse you," said Syl. "I am a she, thank you. How would you like to be called an it?"
"I'v-ve heard worse," Murk said, staring at the honorspren. "S-so you're a talking sh-she-windsp-spren who follows k-Kaladin. Sure. Why n-not."
"But, Rock," Kaladin said, looking back at the big Horneater. "You could see her before she showed herself to you. How?"
"I am alaii'iku," Rock said with a shrug.
Alaii'iku? What did that mean? And does it explain how I can see Syl, even when she hides herself?
"Which means?" Kaladin said.
Rock grunted. "Airsick lowlanders. You know nothing you should. But even if you are airsick, you are special."
"Luck," said Kaladin.
On Sarus' shoulder, Archive let out a whisper-soft, derisive snort.
"Airsick," said Rock, shaking his head.
"I h-have to say," Murk said, "I'm with R-Rock."
Kaladin chuckled. "Well, thank you, Rock." Then his smile faded. "We still need medicine, though."
Sarus watched the bridgeleader think. After a moment, Kaladin seemed to be struck with an epiphany. "I have an idea," he said, glancing at all three of them—Sarus, Rock, and Murk. "Come on."
They followed as he left the barrack, then made for Gaz, talking to the leader of Bridge Three.
"Gaz!" Kaladin called. "I have an offer for you."
The other bridgeleader scowled at Kaladin, then made himself scarce. Gaz looked at the four of them approaching him with the hunted look of a scavenger axehound faced with a much larger predator. "What is it this time?" he asked. "More dun spheres?"
"All out of spheres," said Kaladin. "But we can't keep going like this, with you avoiding me and the other crews hating me."
"Don't see why not," Gaz grunted. "Or what we can do about it."
"I have an idea," said Kaladin. "Is anyone on stone-gathering detail today?"
"Bridge Three," Gaz said, gesturing over his shoulder. "But they lost two thirds of their men yesterday. And it'll be my hide that gets tanned if they miss their quota."
"Why not send a different bridge team?" said Kaladin.
"You know what kind of trouble that makes," Gaz said. "I can't be playing favorites. I'd never hear the end of it."
"Favorites, sure," said Kaladin. "But what about least favorites?"
Gaz blinked. "Eh?"
"No one will complain if you make Bridge Four do it."
Sarus blinked at Kaladin. Beside him, Rock was staring. Murk looked almost mutinous. Where was this going?
Gaz narrowed his eye at Kaladin. "Didn't think you'd react well to being treated differently."
"I'll do it this once," Kaladin said. "Look, Gaz, I don't want to spend the rest of my time here fighting you and watching my back with the other crews. This makes things easier for you and makes Bridge Four not seem as lucky. I'll take one bad detail for that."
Gaz still hesitated. "Your men won't like it. I won't let them think this was my idea."
"I'll tell them it was mine," Kaladin promised.
"Fine, then," Gaz said. "Third bell, meet at the western checkpoint. Bridge three can take kitchen cleaning." He turned and strode away, moving quickly, as if afraid Kaladin might change his mind.
"Little man is right," Rock observed. "The men will hate you for this thing. They were looking forward to easy duty." But when Rock himself looked at Kaladin, Sarus noted, his eyes were not narrowed with displeasure. He looked, if anything, intrigued.
Murk, however, looked furious. "I can barely see straight," he hissed. "And you w-want me to do sto-one gathering detail?"
Kaladin winced. "I won't aggravate your injuries, Murk, but if your headache gets worse while we're working I want you to stop and tell me."
Murk looked only slightly mollified.
"But why?" asked Rock. "Why change for harder work?"
"It gets us out of the warcamp," Kaladin said.
Was Kaladin hoping to escape? Or to scavenge? Both were fraught propositions, but scavenging, at least, was not completely impossible.
"What good does that do?" Rock asked.
"Enough good, maybe," said Kaladin, "to make the difference between life and death." He looked between the three of them, visibly considering. "The four of us might be enough," he said. "While we're out of the camp, we're going to look for a certain plant. A reed."
"Y-you want us to d-do stone gath-thering," said Murk, with impressive incredulity for a man stuttering on every other word, "to find reeds?"
"Yes. Its sap serves as an antiseptic," said Kaladin. "If I can get enough of that sap, I can keep our people's wounds from getting infected. I might even be able to save Teft."
Rock nodded slowly. "And this reed, it grows here?"
"In patches outside the camp," said Kaladin. "But without an excuse to leave the camp, I can't collect any."
"This thing makes sense," said Rock. "I shall help you gather these reeds."
Sarus nodded.
Murk looked between them, then sighed. "Oh, f-fine." He glowered at Kaladin. "You're l-like a poorly-t-trained axehound, you kn-know," he said. "G-give you an inch of s-slack on the le-lead, and you take off r-running."
Kaladin laughed. "I'll owe you one for this, Murk," he promised. "Thank you. All three of you."
![Of Many Colors [Stormlight Archive/Lord of the Rings]](/data/threadmark-index-icons/l/65/65022.jpg?1661803183){kind=icon}
