Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

It had been during his days as a slave. He remembered crouching in the darkness, thick forest underbrush scratching his skin, the night around him too quiet. The animals had fled; they knew something was wrong.

The other slaves didn’t whisper, shift, or cough in their hiding places. He’d taught them well.

We have to go. Have to move.

He tugged on Nalma’s hand. He’d promised to help the older woman find her husband, who had been sold to another household. That wasn’t supposed to be legal, but you could get away with doing all kinds of things to slaves with the right brands, especially if they were foreign.

She resisted his tug, and he could understand her hesitance. The underbrush was safe, for the moment. It was also too obvious. The brightlords had chased them in circles for days, getting closer and closer. Stay here, and the slaves would be captured.

He tugged again, and she passed the signal to the next slave, all the way down the line. Then she clung to his hand as he led them—as quietly as he could—toward where he remembered a game trail.

Get away.

Find freedom. Find honor again.

It had to be out there somewhere.

The snapping sound of the trap closing sent a jolt through Kaladin. A year later, he’d still wonder how he missed stepping in it himself.

It got Nalma instead. She yanked her hand from his as she screamed.

Hunters’ horns moaned in the night. Light burst from newly unshielded lanterns, showing men in uniforms among the trees. The other slaves broke, bursting out of the underbrush like game for sport. Next to Kaladin, Nalma’s leg was caught in a fierce steel trap—a thing of springs and jaws that they wouldn’t even use on a beast, for fear of ruining the sport. Her tibia jutted through her skin.

“Oh, Stormfather,” Kaladin whispered as painspren writhed around them. “Stormfather!” He tried to stanch the blood, but it spurted between his fingers. “Stormfather, no. Stormfather!”

“Kaladin,” she said through clenched teeth. “Kaladin, run…”

Arrows cut down several of the fleeing slaves. Traps caught two others. In the distance, a voice called, “Wait! That’s my property you’re cutting down.”

“A necessity, Brightlord,” a stronger voice said. The local highlord. “Unless you want to encourage more of this behavior.”

So much blood. Kaladin uselessly made a bandage as Nalma tried to push him away, to make him run. He took her hand and held it instead, weeping as she died.

After killing the others, the brightlords found him still kneeling there. Against reason, they spared him. They said it was because he hadn’t run with the others, but in truth they’d needed someone to bear warning to the other slaves.

Regardless of the reason, Kaladin had lived.

He always did.

*

There was no underbrush here in Shadesmar, but those old instincts served Kaladin well as he crept toward the lighthouse. He’d suggested that he scout ahead, as he didn’t trust this dark land. The others had agreed. With Lashings, he could get away most easily in an emergency—and neither Adolin nor Azure had experience scouting. Kaladin didn’t mention that most of his practice sneaking had come as a runaway slave.

He focused on staying low to the ground, trying to use rifts in the black stone to hide his approach. Fortunately, stepping silently wasn’t difficult on this glassy ground.

The lighthouse was a large stone tower topped by an enormous bonfire. It threw a flagrant orange glow over the point of the peninsula. Where did they get the fuel for that thing?

He drew closer, accidentally startling a burst of lifespren, which shot up from some crystalline plants, then floated back down. He froze, but heard no sounds from the lighthouse.

Once he got a little closer, he settled down to watch for a while, to see if he could spot anything suspicious. He sorely missed the diaphanous form Syl had in the Physical Realm; she could have reported back to the others what he’d seen, or even scouted into the building herself, invisible to all but the right eyes.

After a short time, something crawled out of the beads of the ocean near him: a round lurglike creature with a fat, bulbous body and squat legs. About the size of a toddler, it hopped close to him, then tipped the entire top half of its head backward. A long tongue shot up in the air from the gaping mouth; it began to flap and wave.

Storms. An anticipationspren? They looked like streamers on his side, but those … those were waving tongues? What other simple, stable parts of his life were complete lies?

Two more anticipationspren joined the first, clustering near him and deploying their long, wagging tongues. He kicked at them. “Shoo.” Deceptively solid, they refused to budge, so he tried calming himself, hoping it would banish them. Finally, he just continued forward, his three bothersome attendants hopping behind. That sorely undermined the stealth of his approach, making him more nervous—which in turn made the anticipationspren even more eager to stick with him.

He managed to reach the wall of the tower, where he might have expected the heat of the enormous fire to be oppressive. Instead, he could barely feel it. Notably, the flames caused his shadow to behave normally, extending behind him instead of pointing toward the sun.

He took a breath, then glanced up through the open-shuttered window, into the ground floor of the lighthouse.

Inside, he saw an old Shin man—with furrowed, wrinkled skin and a completely bald head—sitting in a chair, reading by spherelight. A human? Kaladin couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not. The old man began to turn a page in his book, then froze, looking up.

Kaladin ducked down, heart thumping. Those stupid anticipationspren continued to crowd nearby, but their tongues shouldn’t be visible through the window—

“Hello?” an accented voice called from inside the lighthouse. “Who’s out there? Show yourself!”

Kaladin sighed, then stood up. So much for his promise to do some stealthy reconnaissance.

*

Shallan waited with the others in the shadow of a strange rock growth. It looked something like a mushroom made from obsidian, the height of a tree; she thought she’d seen its like before, during one of her glimpses into Shadesmar. Pattern said it was alive, but “very, very slow.”

The group waited, pensive, as Kaladin scouted. She hated sending him alone, but Shallan knew nothing about that sort of work. Veil did. But Veil … still felt broken, from what had happened in Kholinar. That was dangerous. Where would Shallan hide now? As Radiant?

Find the balance, Wit had said. Accept the pain, but don’t accept that you deserved it.…

She sighed, then got out her sketchbook and started drawing some of the spren they’d seen.

“So,” Syl said, sitting on a rock nearby and swinging her legs. “I’ve always wondered. Does the world look weird to you, or normal?”

“Weird,” Pattern said. “Mmm. Same as for everyone.”