Words of Radiance

  “I—”

  “A man hunting game will return with a mink if there are no telm to be found,” she said. “Those deserters have to kill to survive out here. Didn’t you say there was probably going to be a highstorm tonight?”

  “Yes,” Tvlakv said, reluctant. “Two hours after sunset, if the list I bought is correct.”

  “I don’t know how bandits normally weather the storms,” Shallan said, “but they’ve obviously committed to chasing us down. I’d bet they plan to use the wagons as shelter after killing us. They’re not going to let us go.”

  “Perhaps,” Tvlakv said. “Yes, perhaps. But Brightness, if we see that second column of smoke ahead, so might the deserters. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Tag said, nodding, as if he’d only just realized it. “We cut east. The killers might go after the group ahead.”

  “We let them attack someone else instead of us?” Shallan said, folding her arms.

  “What else would you expect us to do, Brightness?” Tvlakv said, exasperated. “We are small cremlings, you see. Our only choice is to keep away from larger creatures and hope for them to hunt one another.”

  Shallan narrowed her eyes, inspecting that small column of smoke ahead. Was it her eyes, or was it growing thicker? She looked backward. Actually, the columns looked to be about the same size.

  They won’t hunt prey their own size, Shallan thought. They left the army, ran away. They’re cowards.

  Nearby, she could see Bluth looking backward as well, watching that smoke with an expression she couldn’t read. Disgust? Longing? Fear? No spren to give her a clue.

  Cowards, she thought again, or just men disillusioned? Rocks who started rolling down a hillside, only to start going so quickly they don’t know how to stop?

  It didn’t matter. Those rocks would crush Shallan and the others, if given the chance. Cutting eastward wouldn’t work. The deserters would take the easy kill—slow-moving wagons—instead of the potentially harder kill straight ahead.

  “We make for the second column of smoke,” Shallan said, sitting down.

  Tvlakv looked at her. “You don’t get to—” He broke off as she met his eyes.

  “You . . .” Tvlakv said, licking his lips. “You won’t get . . . to the Shattered Plains as quickly, Brightness, if we get tied up with a larger caravan, you see. It could be bad.”

  “I will deal with that if the problem arises, tradesman Tvlakv.”

  “Those ahead will keep moving,” Tvlakv warned. “We may arrive at that camp and find them gone.”

  “In which case,” Shallan said, “they will either be moving toward the Shattered Plains or coming this way, along the corridor toward the port cities. We will intersect them eventually one way or another.”

  Tvlakv sighed, then nodded, calling to Tag to hurry.

  Shallan sat down, feeling a thrill. Bluth returned and took his seat, then shoved a few wizened roots in her direction. Lunch, apparently. Shortly, the wagons began rolling northward, Shallan’s wagon falling into place third in line this time.

  Shallan settled into her seat for the trip—they were hours away from that second group, even if they did manage to catch up to it. To keep from worrying, she finished her sketches of the landscape. She then turned to idle sketches, simply letting her pencil go where it willed.

  She drew skyeels dancing in the air. She drew the docks of Kharbranth. She did a sketch of Yalb, though the face felt off to her, and she didn’t quite capture the mischievous spark in his eyes. Perhaps the errors related to how sad she became, thinking of what had probably happened to him.

  She flipped the page and started a random sketch, whatever came into her mind. Her pencil moved into a depiction of an elegant woman in a stately gown. Loose but sleek below the waist, tight across the chest and stomach. Long, open sleeves, one hiding the safehand, the other cut at the elbow exposing the forearm and draping down below.

  A bold, poised woman. In control. Still drawing unconsciously, Shallan added her own face to the elegant woman’s head.

  She hesitated, pencil hovering above the image. That wasn’t her. Was it? Could it be?

  She stared at that image as the wagon bumped over rocks and plants. She flipped to the next page and started another drawing. A ball gown, a woman at court, surrounded by the elite of Alethkar as she imagined them. Tall, strong. The woman belonged among them.

  Shallan added her face to the figure.

  She flipped the page and did another one. And then another.

  The last one was a sketch of her standing at the edge of the Shattered Plains as she imagined them. Looking eastward, toward the secrets that Jasnah had sought.

  Shallan flipped the page and drew again. A picture of Jasnah on the ship, seated at her desk, papers and books sprawled around her. It wasn’t the setting that mattered, but the face. That worried, terrified face. Exhausted, pushed to her limits.

  Shallan got this one right. The first drawing since the disaster that captured perfectly what she’d seen. Jasnah’s burden.

  “Stop the wagon,” Shallan said, not looking up.

  Bluth glanced at her. She resisted the urge to say it again. He didn’t, unfortunately, obey immediately.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  Shallan looked up. The smoke column was still distant, but she’d been right, it was growing thicker. The group ahead had stopped and built a sizable fire for the midday meal. Judging by that smoke, they were a much larger group than the one behind.

  “I’m going to get into the back,” Shallan said. “I need to look something up. You can continue when I’m settled, but please stop and call to me once we’re near to the group ahead.”

  He sighed, but stopped the chull with a few whacks on the shell. Shallan climbed down, then took the knobweed and notebook, moved to the back of the wagon. Once she was in, Bluth started up again immediately, shouting back to Tvlakv, who had demanded to know the meaning of the delay.

  With the walls up her wagon was shaded and private, particularly with it being last in line so nobody could look in the back door at her. Unfortunately, riding in the back wasn’t as comfortable as riding in the front. Those tiny rockbuds caused a surprising amount of jarring and jolting.

  Jasnah’s trunk was tied in place near the front wall. She opened the lid—letting the spheres inside provide dusky illumination—then settled back on her improvised cushion, a pile of the cloths Jasnah had used to wrap her books. The blanket she used at night—as Tvlakv had been unable to produce one for her—was the velvet lining she had ripped out of the trunk.

  Settling back, she unwrapped her feet to apply the new knobweed. They were scabbed over and much improved from their condition just a day before. “Pattern?”

  He vibrated from somewhere nearby. She’d asked him to remain in the back so as to not alarm Tvlakv and the guards.

  “My feet are healing,” she said. “Did you do this?”

  “Mmmm . . . I know almost nothing of why people break. I know less of why they . . . unbreak.”

  “Your kind don’t get wounded?” she asked, snapping off a knobweed stem and squeezing the drops onto her left foot.

  “We break. We just do it . . . differently than men do. And we do not unbreak without aid. I do not know why you unbreak. Why?”

  “It is a natural function of our bodies,” she said. “Living things repair themselves automatically.” She held one of her spheres close, searching for signs of little red rotspren. Where she found a few of them along one cut, she was quick to apply sap and chase them off.

  “I would like to know why things work,” Pattern said.

  “So would many of us,” Shallan said, bent over. She grimaced as the wagon hit a particularly large rock. “I made myself glow last night, by the fire with Tvlakv.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Lies.”

  “My dress changed,” Shallan said. “I swear the scuffs and rips were gone last night. They’ve returned now, though.” r />
  “Mmm. Yes.”

  “I have to be able to control this thing we can do. Jasnah called it Lightweaving. She implied it was far safer to practice than Soulcasting.”

  “The book?”

  Shallan frowned, sitting back against the bars on the side of the wagon. Beside her, a long line of scratches on the floor looked like they’d been made by fingernails. As if one of the slaves had tried, in a fit of madness, to claw his way to freedom.

  The book Jasnah had given her, Words of Radiance, had been swallowed by the ocean. It seemed a greater loss than the other one Jasnah had given her, the Book of Endless Pages, which had strangely been blank. She didn’t understand the full significance of that yet.

  “I never got a chance to actually read that book,” Shallan said. “We’ll need to see if we can find another copy once we reach the Shattered Plains.” Their destination being a warcamp, though, she doubted that many books would be for sale.

  Shallan held one of her spheres up before herself. It was growing dim, and needed to be reinfused. What would happen if the highstorm came, and they hadn’t caught up to the group ahead? Would the deserters push through the storm itself to reach them? And, potentially, the safety of their wagons?

  Storms, what a mess. She needed an edge. “The Knights Radiant formed a bond with spren,” Shallan said, more to herself than to Pattern. “It was a symbiotic relationship, like a little cremling who lives in the shalebark. The cremling cleans off the lichen, getting food, but also keeping the shalebark clean.”

  Pattern buzzed in confusion. “Am I . . . the shalebark or the cremling?”

  “Either,” Shallan said, turning the diamond sphere in her fingers—the tiny gemstone trapped inside glowed with a vigilant light, suspended in glass. “The Surges—the forces that run the world—are more pliable to spren. Or . . . well . . . since spren are pieces of those Surges, maybe it’s that the spren are better at influencing one another. Our bond gives me the ability to manipulate one of the Surges. In this case, light, the power of Illumination.”

  “Lies,” Pattern whispered. “And truths.”

  Shallan gripped the sphere in her fist, the light shining through her skin making her hand glow red. She willed the Light to enter her, but nothing happened. “So, how do I make it work?”

  “Perhaps eat it?” Pattern said, moving over onto the wall beside her head.

  “Eat it?” Shallan asked, skeptical. “I didn’t need to eat it before to get the Stormlight.”

  “Might work, though. Try?”

  “I doubt I could swallow an entire sphere,” Shallan said. “Even if I wanted to, which I distinctly do not.”

  “Mmmm,” Pattern said, his vibrations making the wood shake. “This . . . is not one of the things humans like to eat, then?”

  “Storms, no. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  “I have,” he said with an annoyed zip of a vibration. “But it is difficult to tell! You consume some things, and turn them into other things . . . Very curious things that you hide. They have value? But you leave them. Why?”

  “We are done with that conversation,” Shallan said, opening her fist and holding up the sphere again. Though, admittedly, something about what he said felt right. She hadn’t eaten any spheres before, but she had somehow . . . consumed the Light. Like drinking it.

  She’d breathed it in, right? She stared at the sphere for a moment, then sucked in a sharp breath.

  It worked. The Light left the sphere, quick as a heartbeat, a bright line streaming into her chest. From there it spread, filling her. The unusual sensation made her feel anxious, alert, ready. Eager to be about . . . something. Her muscles tensed.

  “It worked,” she said, though when she spoke, Stormlight—glowing faintly—puffed out in front of her. It rose from her skin, too. She had to practice before it all left. Lightweaving . . . She needed to create something. She decided to go with what she’d done before, improving the look of her dress.

  Again, nothing happened. She didn’t know what to do, what muscles to use, or even if muscles mattered. Frustrated, she sat there trying to find a way to make the Stormlight work, feeling inept as it escaped through her skin.

  It took several minutes for it to dissipate completely. “Well, that was distinctly unimpressive,” she said, moving to get more stalks of knobweed. “Maybe I should practice Soulcasting instead.”

  Pattern buzzed. “Dangerous.”

  “So Jasnah told me,” Shallan said. “But I don’t have her to teach me anymore, and so far as I know, she’s the only one who could have done so. It’s either practice on my own or never learn to use the ability.” She squeezed out another few drops of knobweed sap, moved to massage it into a cut on her foot, then stopped. The wound was noticeably smaller than it had been just moments ago.

  “The Stormlight is healing me,” Shallan said.

  “It makes you unbreak?”

  “Yes. Stormfather! I’m doing things almost by accident.”

  “Can something be ‘almost’ an accident?” Pattern asked, genuinely curious. “This phrase, I do not know what it means.”

  “I . . . Well, it’s mostly a figure of speech.” Then, before he could ask further, she continued, “And by that I mean something we say to convey an idea or a feeling, but not a literal fact.”

  Pattern buzzed.

  “What does that mean?” Shallan asked, massaging the knobweed in anyway. “When you buzz like that. What are you feeling?”

  “Hmmm . . . Excited. Yes. It has been so long since anyone has learned of you and your kind.”

  Shallan squeezed some more sap onto her toes. “You came to learn? Wait . . . you’re a scholar?”

  “Of course. Hmmm. Why else would I come? I will learn so much before—”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “Pattern?” she asked. “Before what?”

  “A figure of speech.” He said it perfectly flatly, absent of tone. He was growing better and better at speaking like a person, and at times he sounded just like one. But now all of the color had gone from his voice.

  “You’re lying,” she accused him, glancing at his pattern on the wall. He had shrunk, growing as small as a fist, half his usual size.

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly.

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Shallan said, surprised at the realization.

  “Yes.”

  “But you love lies!”

  “So fascinating,” he said. “You are all so fascinating.”

  “Tell me what you were going to say,” Shallan ordered. “Before you stopped yourself. I’ll know if you lie.”

  “Hmmmm. You sound like her. More and more like her.”

  “Tell me.”

  He buzzed with an annoyed sound, quick and high pitched. “I will learn what I can of you before you kill me.”

  “You think . . . You think I’m going to kill you?”

  “It happened to the others,” Pattern said, his voice softer now. “It will happen to me. It is . . . a pattern.”

  “This has to do with the Knights Radiant,” Shallan said, raising her hands to start braiding her hair. That would be better than leaving it wild—though without a comb and brush, even braiding it was hard. Storms, she thought, I need a bath. And soap. And a dozen other things.

  “Yes,” Pattern said. “The knights killed their spren.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Their oaths,” Pattern said. “It is all I know. My kind, those who were unbonded, we retreated, and many kept our minds. Even still, it is hard to think apart from my kind, unless . . .”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless we have a person.”

  “So that’s what you get out of it,” Shallan said, untangling her hair with her fingers. “Symbiosis. I get access to Surgebinding, you get thought.”

  “Sapience,” Pattern said. “Thought. Life. These are of humans. We are ideas. Ideas that wish to live.”

  Shallan continued working on her hair. “I’m not going to ki
ll you,” she said firmly. “I won’t do it.”

  “I don’t suppose the others intended to either,” he said. “But it is no matter.”

  “It is an important matter,” Shallan said. “I won’t do it. I’m not one of the Knights Radiant. Jasnah made that clear. A man who can use a sword isn’t necessarily a soldier. Just because I can do what I do doesn’t make me one of them.”

  “You spoke oaths.”

  Shallan froze.

  Life before death . . . The words drifted toward her from the shadows of her past. A past she would not think of.

  “You live lies,” Pattern said. “It gives you strength. But the truth . . . Without speaking truths you will not be able to grow, Shallan. I know this somehow.”

  She finished with her hair and moved to rewrap her feet. Pattern had moved to the other side of the rattling wagon chamber, settling onto the wall, only faintly visible in the dim light. She had a handful of infused spheres left. Not much Stormlight, considering how quickly that other had left her. Should she use what she had to further heal her feet? Could she even do that intentionally, or would the ability elude her, as Lightweaving had?

  She tucked the spheres into her safepouch. She would save them, just in case. For now, these spheres and their Light might be the only weapon available to her.

  Bandages redone, she stood up in the rattling wagon and found that her foot pain was nearly gone. She could walk almost normally, though she still wouldn’t want to go far without shoes. Pleased, she knocked on the wood nearest to Bluth. “Stop the wagon!”

  This time, she didn’t have to repeat herself. She rounded the wagon and, taking her seat beside Bluth, immediately noticed the smoke column ahead. It had grown darker, larger, roiling violently.

  “That’s no cook fire,” Shallan said.

  “Aye,” Bluth said, expression dark. “Something big is burning. Probably wagons.” He glanced at her. “Whoever is up there, it doesn’t look like things went well for them.”

  Scholarform shown for patience and thought.

  Beware its ambitions innate.

  Though study and diligence bring the reward,

  Loss of innocence may be one’s fate.

  —From the Listener Song of Listing, 69th stanza