Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

“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 kill 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.”

18. Bruises

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

“New guys are coming along, gancho,” Lopen said, taking a bite of the paper-wrapped something he was eating. “Wearing their uniforms, talking like real men. Funny. It only took them a few days. Took us weeks.”

“It took the rest of the men weeks, but not you,” Kaladin said, shading his eyes from the sun and leaning on his spear. He was still on the lighteyes’ practice grounds, watching over Adolin and Renarin—the latter of whom was receiving his first instructions from Zahel the swordmaster. “You had a good attitude from the first day we found you, Lopen.”

“Well, life was pretty good, you know?”

“Pretty good? You’d just been assigned to carry siege bridges until you died on the plateaus.”

“Eh,” Lopen said, taking a bite of his food. It looked like a thick piece of flatbread wrapped around something goopy. He licked his lips, then handed it to Kaladin to free his single hand so he could dig in his pocket for a moment. “You have bad days. You have good days. Evens out eventually.”

“You’re a strange man, Lopen,” Kaladin said, inspecting the “food” Lopen had been eating. “What is this?”

“Chouta.”

“Chowder?”

“Cha-ou-ta. Herdazian food, gon. Good stuff. You can have a bite, if you want.”

It seemed to be chunks of undefinable meat slathered in some dark liquid, all wrapped in overly thick bread. “Disgusting,” Kaladin said, handing it back as Lopen gave him the thing he’d dug out of his pocket, a shell with glyphs written on both sides.

“Your loss,” Lopen said, taking another bite.

“You shouldn’t be walking around eating like that,” Kaladin noted. “It’s rude.”

“Nah, it’s convenient. See, it’s wrapped up good. You can walk about, get stuff done, eat at the same time…”

“Slovenly,” Kaladin said, inspecting the shell. It listed Sigzil’s tallies of how many troops they had, how much food Rock thought they’d need, and Teft’s assessments of how many of the former bridgemen were fit for training.

That last number was pretty high. If bridgemen lived, they got strong carrying bridges. As Kaladin had proven firsthand, that translated to their making fine soldiers, assuming they could be motivated.

On the reverse side of the shell, Sigzil had outlined a path for Kaladin to take on patrol outside the warcamps. He’d soon have enough of the greenvines ready to begin patrolling the region outside of the warcamps, as he’d told Dalinar he would do. Teft thought it would be good for Kaladin to go himself, as it would let the new men spend time with Kaladin.

“Highstorm tonight,” Lopen noted. “Sig says it will come two hours after sunset. He thought you’d want to make preparations.”

Kaladin nodded. Another chance for those mysterious numbers to appear—both times before, they’d come during storms. He’d make extra certain Dalinar and his family were being watched.