Oathbringer

  As the camp broke, they scattered about, excited to finally be released. One younger girl scampered across the wet stones and seized the empty hand of the man leading Kaladin. Each of the children bore the distinctive look of their elders—the not-quite-Parshendi appearance with the armored portions on the sides of their heads and forearms. For the children, the color of the carapace was a light orange-pink.

  Kaladin couldn’t define why this sight seemed so strange to him. Parshmen did breed, though people often spoke of them being bred, like animals. And, well, that wasn’t far from the truth, was it? Everyone knew it.

  What would Shen—Rlain—think if Kaladin had said those words out loud?

  The procession moved out of the trees, Kaladin led by his ropes. They kept talk to a minimum, and as they crossed through a field in the darkness, Kaladin had a distinct impression of familiarity. Had he been here before, done this before?

  “What about the king?” his captor said, speaking in a soft voice, but turning his head to direct the question at Kaladin.

  Elhokar? What … Oh, right. The cards.

  “The king is one of the most powerful cards you can place,” Kaladin said, struggling to remember all the rules. “He can capture any other card except another king, and can’t be captured himself unless touched by three enemy cards of knight or better. Um … and he is immune to the Soulcaster.” I think.

  “When I watched men play, they used this card rarely. If it is so powerful, why delay?”

  “If your king gets captured, you lose,” Kaladin said. “So you only play him if you’re desperate or if you are certain you can defend him. Half the times I’ve played, I left him in my barrack all game.”

  The parshman grunted, then looked to the girl at his side, who tugged on his arm and pointed. He gave her a whispered response, and she ran on tiptoes toward a patch of flowering rockbuds, visible by the light of the first moon.

  The vines pulled back, blossoms closing. The girl, however, knew to squat at the side and wait, hands poised, until the flowers reopened—then she snatched one in each hand, her giggles echoing across the plain. Joyspren followed her like blue leaves as she returned, giving Kaladin a wide berth.

  Khen, walking with a cudgel in her hands, urged Kaladin’s captor to keep moving. She watched the area with the nervousness of a scout on a dangerous mission.

  That’s it, Kaladin thought, remembering why this felt familiar. Sneaking away from Tasinar.

  It had happened after he’d been condemned by Amaram, but before he’d been sent to the Shattered Plains. He avoided thinking of those months. His repeated failures, the systematic butchering of his last hints of idealism … well, he’d learned that dwelling on such things took him to dark places. He’d failed so many people during those months. Nalma had been one of those. He could remember the touch of her hand in his: a rough, callused hand.

  That had been his most successful escape attempt. It had lasted five days.

  “You’re not monsters,” Kaladin whispered. “You’re not soldiers. You’re not even the seeds of the void. You’re just … runaway slaves.”

  His captor spun, yanking on Kaladin’s rope. The parshman seized Kaladin by the front of his uniform, and his daughter hid behind his leg, dropping one of her flowers and whimpering.

  “Do you want me to kill you?” the parshman asked, pulling Kaladin’s face close to his own. “You insist on reminding me how your kind see us?”

  Kaladin grunted. “Look at my forehead, parshman.”

  “And?”

  “Slave brands.”

  “What?”

  Storms … parshmen weren’t branded, and they didn’t mix with other slaves. Parshmen were actually too valuable for that. “When they make a human into a slave,” Kaladin said, “they brand him. I’ve been here. Right where you are.”

  “And you think that makes you understand?”

  “Of course it does. I’m one—”

  “I have spent my entire life living in a fog,” the parshman yelled at him. “Every day knowing I should say something, do something to stop this! Every night clutching my daughter, wondering why the world seems to move around us in the light—while we are trapped in shadows. They sold her mother. Sold her. Because she had birthed a healthy child, which made her good breeding stock.

  “Do you understand that, human? Do you understand watching your family be torn apart, and knowing you should object—knowing deep in your soul that something is profoundly wrong? Can you know that feeling of being unable to say a single storming word to stop it?”

  The parshman pulled him even closer. “They may have taken your freedom, but they took our minds.”

  He dropped Kaladin and whirled, gathering up his daughter and holding her close as he jogged to catch up to the others, who had turned back at the outburst. Kaladin followed, yanked by his rope, stepping on the little girl’s flower in his forced haste. Syl zipped past, and when Kaladin tried to catch her attention, she just laughed and flew higher on a burst of wind.

  His captor suffered several quiet chastisements when they caught up; this column couldn’t afford to draw attention. Kaladin walked with them, and remembered. He did understand a little.

  You were never free while you ran; you felt as if the open sky and the endless fields were a torment. You could feel the pursuit following, and each morning you awoke expecting to find yourself surrounded.

  Until one day you were right.

  But parshmen? He’d accepted Shen into Bridge Four, yes. But accepting that a sole parshman could be a bridgeman was starkly different from accepting the entire people as … well, human.

  As the column stopped to distribute waterskins to the children, Kaladin felt at his forehead, tracing the scarred shape of the glyphs there.

  They took our minds.…

  They’d tried to take his mind too. They’d beaten him to the stones, stolen everything he loved, and murdered his brother. Left him unable to think straight. Life had become a blur until one day he’d found himself standing over a ledge, watching raindrops die and struggling to summon the motivation to end his life.

  Syl soared past in the shape of a shimmering ribbon.

  “Syl,” Kaladin hissed. “I need to talk to you. This isn’t the time for—”

  “Hush,” she said, then giggled and zipped around him before flitting over and doing the same to his captor.

  Kaladin frowned. She was acting so carefree. Too carefree? Like she’d been back before they forged their bond?

  No. It couldn’t be.

  “Syl?” he begged as she returned. “Is something wrong with the bond? Please, I didn’t—”

  “It’s not that,” she said, speaking in a furious whisper. “I think parshmen might be able to see me. Some, at least. And that other spren is still here too. A higher spren, like me.”

  “Where?” Kaladin asked, twisting.

  “She’s invisible to you,” Syl said, becoming a group of leaves and blowing around him. “I think I’ve fooled her into thinking I’m just a windspren.”

  She zipped away, leaving a dozen unanswered questions on Kaladin’s lips. Storms … is that spren how they know where to go?

  The column started again, and Kaladin walked for a good hour in silence before Syl next decided to come back to him. She landed on his shoulder, becoming the image of a young woman in her whimsical skirt. “She’s gone ahead for a little bit,” she said. “And the parshmen aren’t looking.”

  “The spren is guiding them,” Kaladin said under his breath. “Syl, this spren must be…”

  “From him,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself and growing small—actively shrinking to about two-thirds her normal size. “Voidspren.”

  “There’s more,” Kaladin said. “These parshmen … how do they know how to talk, how to act? Yes, they’ve spent their lives around society—but to be this, well, normal after such a long time half asleep?”

  “The Everstorm,” Syl said. “Power has filled the holes in
their souls, bridging the gaps. They didn’t just wake, Kaladin. They’ve been healed, Connection refounded, Identity restored. There’s more to this than we ever realized. Somehow when you conquered them, you stole their ability to change forms. You literally ripped off a piece of their souls and locked it away.” She turned sharply. “She’s coming back. I will stay nearby, in case you need a Blade.”

  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.

  Veil tossed aside the havah, instead pulling on trousers and a tight shirt, then boots and a long white coat. She finished with only a simple glove on the left hand. Veil, of course, wasn’t in the least embarrassed at that.

  There was a simple relief for Shallan’s pain. There was an easy way to hide. Veil hadn’t suffered as Shallan had—and she was tough enough to handle that sort of thing anyway. Becoming her was like setting down a terrible burden.

  Veil threw a scarf around her neck, then slung a rugged satchel—acquired for Veil specifically—over her shoulder. Hopefully the conspicuous knife handle sticking out from the top would look natural, even intimidating.

  The part at the back of her mind that was still Shallan worried about this. Would she look fake? She’d almost certainly missed
some subtle clues encoded in her behavior, dress, or speech. These would indicate to the right people that Veil didn’t have the hard-bitten experience she feigned.

  Well, she would have to do her best and hope to recover from her inevitable mistakes. She tied another knife onto her belt, long, but not quite a sword, since Veil wasn’t lighteyed. Fortunately. No lighteyed woman would be able to prance around so obviously armed. Some mores grew lax the farther you descended the social ladder.

  “Well?” Veil asked, turning to the wall, where Pattern hung.

  “Mmm…” he said. “Good lie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not like the other.”

  “Radiant?”

  “You slip in and out of her,” Pattern said, “like the sun behind clouds.”

  “I just need more practice,” Veil said. Yes, that voice sounded excellent. Shallan was getting far better with sounds.

  She picked Pattern up—which involved pressing her hand against the wall, letting him pass over to her skin and then her coat. With him humming happily, she crossed her room and stepped out onto the balcony. The first moon had risen, violet and proud Salas. She was the least bright of the moons, which meant it was mostly dark out.

  Most rooms on the outside had these small balconies, but hers on the second level was particularly advantageous. It had steps down to the field below. Covered in furrows for water and ridges for planting rockbuds, the field also had boxes at the edges for growing tubers or ornamental plants. Each tier of the city had a similar one, with eighteen levels inside separating them.

  She stepped down to the field in the darkness. How had anything ever grown up here? Her breath puffed out in front of her, and coldspren grew around her feet.

  The field had a small access doorway back into Urithiru. Perhaps the subterfuge of not exiting through her room wasn’t necessary, but Veil preferred to be careful. She wouldn’t want guards or servants remarking on how Brightness Shallan went about during odd hours of the night.

  Besides, who knew where Mraize and his Ghostbloods had operatives? They hadn’t contacted her since that first day in Urithiru, but she knew they’d be watching. She still didn’t know what to do about them. They had admitted to assassinating Jasnah, which should be grounds enough to hate them. They also seemed to know things, important things, about the world.