Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

She left, zipping straight into the air as a ribbon of light. Kaladin continued to shuffle behind the column, chewing on her words, before speeding up and stepping beside his captor.

“You’re being smart, in some ways,” Kaladin said. “It’s good to travel at night. But you’re following the riverbed over there. I know it makes for more trees, and more secure camping, but this is literally the first place someone would look for you.”

Several of the other parshmen gave him glances from nearby. His captor didn’t say anything.

“The big group is an issue too,” Kaladin added. “You should break into smaller groups and meet up each morning, so if you get spotted you’ll seem less threatening. You can say you were sent somewhere by a lighteyes, and travelers might let you go. If they run across all seventy of you together, there’s no chance of that. This is all assuming, of course, you don’t want to fight—which you don’t. If you fight, they’ll call out the highlords against you. For now they’ve got bigger problems.”

His captor grunted.



“I can help you,” Kaladin said. “I might not understand what you’ve been through, but I do know what it feels like to run.”

“You think I’d trust you?” the parshman finally said. “You will want us to be caught.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Kaladin said, truthful.

His captor said nothing more and Kaladin sighed, dropping back into position behind. Why had the Everstorm not granted these parshmen powers like those on the Shattered Plains? What of the stories of scripture and lore? The Desolations?

They eventually stopped for another break, and Kaladin found himself a smooth rock to sit against, nestled into the stone. His captor tied the rope to a nearby lonely tree, then went to confer with the others. Kaladin leaned back, lost in thought until he heard a sound. He was surprised to find his captor’s daughter approaching. She carried a waterskin in two hands, and stopped right beyond his reach.

She didn’t have shoes, and the walk so far had not been kind to her feet, which—though tough with calluses—were still scored by scratches and scrapes. She timidly set the waterskin down, then backed away. She didn’t flee, as Kaladin might have expected, when he reached for the water.

“Thank you,” he said, then took a mouthful. It was pure and clear—apparently the parshmen knew how to settle and scoop their water. He ignored the rumbling of his stomach.

“Will they really chase us?” the girl asked.

By Mishim’s pale green light, he decided this girl was not as timid as he had assumed. She was nervous, but she met his eyes with hers.

“Why can’t they just let us go?” she asked. “Could you go back and tell them? We don’t want trouble. We just want to go away.”

“They’ll come,” Kaladin said. “I’m sorry. They have a lot of work to do in rebuilding, and they’ll want the extra hands. You are a … resource they can’t simply ignore.”

The humans he’d visited hadn’t known to expect some terrible Voidbringer force; many thought their parshmen had merely run off in the chaos.

“But why?” she said, sniffling. “What did we do to them?”

“You tried to destroy them.”

“No. We’re nice. We’ve always been nice. I never hit anyone, even when I was mad.”

“I didn’t mean you specifically,” Kaladin said. “Your ancestors—the people like you from long ago. There was a war, and…”

Storms. How did you explain slavery to a seven-year-old? He tossed the waterskin to her, and she scampered back to her father—who had only just noticed her absence. He stood, a stark silhouette in the night, studying Kaladin.

“They’re talking about making camp,” Syl whispered from nearby. She had crawled into a crack in the rock. “The Voidspren wants them to march on through the day, but I don’t think they’re going to. They’re worried about their grain spoiling.”

“Is that spren watching me right now?” Kaladin asked.

“No.”

“Then let’s cut this rope.”

He turned and hid what he was doing, then quickly summoned Syl as a knife to cut himself free. That would change his eye color, but in the darkness, he hoped the parshmen wouldn’t notice.

Syl puffed back into a spren. “Sword now?” she said. “The spheres they took from you have all run out, but they’ll scatter at seeing a Blade.”

“No.” Kaladin instead picked up a large stone. The parshmen hushed, noticing his escape. Kaladin carried his rock a few steps, then dropped it, crushing a rockbud. He was surrounded a few moments later by angry parshmen carrying cudgels.

Kaladin ignored them, picking through the wreckage of the rockbud. He held up a large section of shell.

“The inside of this,” he said, turning it over for them, “will still be dry, despite the rainfall. The rockbud needs a barrier between itself and the water outside for some reason, though it always seems eager to drink after a storm. Who has my knife?”

Nobody moved to return it.

“If you scrape off this inner layer,” Kaladin said, tapping at the rockbud shell, “you can get to the dry portion. Now that the rain has stopped, I should be able to get us a fire going, assuming nobody has lost my tinder bag. We need to boil that grain, then dry it into cakes. They won’t be tasty, but they’ll keep. If you don’t do something soon, your supplies will rot.”

He stood up and pointed. “Since we’re already here, we should be near enough the river that we can gather more water. It won’t flow much longer with the end of the rains.

“Rockbud shells don’t burn particularly well, so we’ll want to harvest some real wood and dry it at the fire during the day. We can keep that one small, then do the cooking tomorrow night. In the dark, the smoke is less likely to reveal us, and we can shield the light in the trees. I just have to figure out how we’re going to cook without any pots to boil the water.”

The parshmen stared at him. Then Khen finally pushed him away from the rockbud and took up the shard he’d been holding. Kaladin spotted his original captor standing near the rock where Kaladin had been sitting. The parshman held the rope Kaladin had cut, rubbing its sliced-through end with his thumb.

After a short conference, the parshmen dragged him to the trees he’d indicated, returned his knife—standing by with every cudgel they had—and demanded that he prove he could build a fire with wet wood.

He did just that.





You cannot have a spice described to you, but must taste it for yourself.

—From Oathbringer, preface

Shallan became Veil.

Stormlight made her face less youthful, more angular. Nose pointed, with a small scar on the chin. Her hair rippled from red to Alethi black. Making an illusion like this took a larger gem of Stormlight, but once it was going, she could maintain it for hours on just a smidgen.