Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

“Is that so? Who decided?”

“I did. And don’t give me excuses about not being lonely, or about ‘only needing your brothers in arms.’ You can’t lie to me. You feel dark, sad. You need something, someone, and she makes you feel better.”

Storms. It felt like Syl and his emotions were double-teaming him. One smiled with encouragement, while the other whispered terrible things. That he’d always be alone. That Tarah had been right to leave him.

He filled another cup with as much water as he could get from the basin, then carried it toward Shallan. The pitching of the ship almost made him dump the cup overboard.

Shallan glanced up as he eased down beside her, his back resting against the deck’s railing. He handed her the cup. “It makes water,” he said, thumbing at the device. “By getting cold.”

“Condensation? How fast does it go? Navani would be interested in that.” She sipped the water, holding it in her gloved safehand—which was strange to see on her. Even when they’d traveled the bottoms of the chasms together, she’d worn a very formal havah.

“You walk like they do,” she said absently, finishing her sketch of one of the flying beasts.

“They?”

“The sailors. You keep your balance well. You’d have been at home as a sailor yourself, I suspect. Unlike some others.” She nodded toward Azure, who stood across the deck, holding on to the railing for dear life and occasionally shooting distrusting glares at the Reachers. Either she did not like being on a ship, or she did not trust the spren. Perhaps both.

“May I?” Kaladin asked, nodding toward Shallan’s sketch. She shrugged, so he took the sketchpad and studied her pictures of the flying beasts. As always, they were excellent. “What does the text say?”

“Just some theorizing,” she said, flipping back a page in her notebook. “I lost my original of this picture, so this is kind of crude. But have you ever seen something like these arrowhead spren here?”

“Yeah…” Kaladin said, studying her drawing of a skyeel flying with arrowhead spren moving around it. “I’ve seen them near greatshells.”

“Chasmfiends, skyeels, anything else that should be heavier than it actually is. Sailors call them luckspren on our side.” She gestured with the cup toward the front of the ship, where sailors managed the flying beasts. “They call these ‘mandras,’ but the arrowhead shapes on their heads are the same shape as luckspren. These are bigger, but I think they—or something like them—help skyeels fly.”

“Chasmfiends don’t fly.”

“They kind of do, mathematically. Bavamar did the calculations on Reshi greatshells, and found they should be crushed by their own weight.”

“Huh,” Kaladin said.

She started to get excited. “There’s more. Those mandras, they vanish sometimes. Their keepers call it ‘dropping.’ I think they must be getting pulled into the Physical Realm. It means you can never use only one mandra to pull a ship, no matter how small that ship. And you can’t take them—or most other spren—too far from human population centers on our side. They waste away and die for reasons people here don’t understand.”

“Huh. So what do they eat?”

“I’m not sure,” Shallan said. “Syl and Pattern talk about feeding off emotions, but there’s something else that…” She trailed off as Kaladin flipped to the next page in her notebook. It seemed like an attempt at drawing Captain Ico, but was incredibly juvenile. Basically just a stick figure.

“Did Adolin get hold of your sketchbook?” he asked.

She snatched the book from him and closed it. “I was just trying out a different style. Thanks for the water.”

“Yes, I had to walk all the way from over there. At least seven steps.”

“Easily ten,” Shallan said. “And on this precarious deck. Very dangerous.”

“Practically as bad as fighting the Fused.”

“Could have stubbed your toe. Or gotten a splinter. Or pitched over the side and been lost to the depths, buried by a thousand thousand beads and the weight of the souls of an infinite number of forgotten objects.”

“Or … that.”

“Highly unlikely,” Shallan agreed. “They keep this deck well maintained, so there really aren’t any splinters.”

“With my luck, I’d find one anyway.”

“I had a splinter once,” Shallan noted. “It eventually got out of hand.”

“You … you did not just say that.”

“Yes, you obviously imagined it. What a sick, sick mind you have, Kaladin.”

Kaladin sighed, then nodded to the sailors. “They do walk about barefoot. Have you noticed that? Something about the copper lines set into the deck.”

“The copper vibrates,” Shallan said. “And they keep touching it. I think they might be using it to communicate somehow.”

“That would explain why they don’t talk much,” Kaladin said. “I’d have expected them to watch us a little more than they do. They don’t seem that curious about us.”

“Which is odd, considering how interesting Azure is.”

“Wait. Just Azure?”

“Yes. In that polished breastplate and striking figure, with her talk of chasing bounties and traveling worlds. She’s deeply mysterious.”

“I’m mysterious,” Kaladin said.

“I used to think you were. Then I found out you don’t like good puns—it’s truly possible to know too much about somebody.”

He grunted. “I’ll try to be more mysterious. Take up bounty hunting.” His stomach growled. “Starting with a bounty on lunch, maybe.”

They’d been promised two meals a day, but considering how long it had taken Ico to remember they needed water, perhaps he should ask.

“I’ve been trying to track our speed,” Shallan said, flipping through her notebook. She went quickly through the pages, and he could see that—oddly—they alternated between expert renditions and comically bad ones.

She landed on a map she’d made of this region in Shadesmar. Alethi rivers were now peninsulas, and the Sea of Spears was an island, with the city named Celebrant on the western side. The river peninsulas meant that in order to get to the city, the ship had to swing to the west. Shallan had marked their path with a line.

“It’s hard to gauge our progress, but I’d guess that we’re moving faster than the average ship in our world. We can go directly where we want without worrying about the winds, for one thing.”

“So … two more days?” Kaladin asked, guessing based on her marks.

“More or less. Quick progress.”

He moved his fingers down, toward the bottom of her map. “Thaylen City?” he asked, tapping one point she’d marked.

“Yes. On this side, it will be on the edge of a lake of beads. We can guess the Oathgate will reflect there as a platform, like the one we left in Kholinar. But how to activate it…”

“I want to try. Dalinar is in danger. We need to get to him, Shallan. In Thaylen City.”