Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

Shallan paled. Well, she paled further. That light skin of hers was so strange. It and the red hair made her look like a very small Horneater. “Dalinar is planning to march just after the final highstorm before the Weeping. That storm is close. And it will involve lots, and lots, and lots of rain.”

“Bad idea, then.”

“You could say so.”

He’d tried to imagine what a highstorm would be like down here. He had seen the aftereffects when salvaging with Bridge Four. The twisted, broken corpses. The piles of refuse crushed against walls and into cracks. Boulders as tall as a man casually washed through chasms until they got wedged between two walls, sometimes fifty feet up in the air.

“When?” he asked. “When is that highstorm?”

She stared at him, then dug into her satchel, flipping through sheets of paper with her freehand while holding the satchel through the fabric of her safehand. She waved him over with his sphere, as she had to tuck hers away.

He held it up for her as she looked over a page with lines of script. “Tomorrow night,” she said softly. “Just after first moonset.”

Kaladin grunted, holding up his sphere and inspecting the chasm. We’re just to the north of the chasm we fell from, he thought. So the way back should be… that way?

“All right then,” Shallan said. She took a deep breath, then snapped her satchel closed. “We walk back, and we start immediately.”

“You don’t want to sit for a moment and catch your breath?”

“My breath is quite well caught,” Shallan said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be moving. Once back, we can sit sipping mulled wine and laugh about how silly it was of us to hurry all that way, since we had so much time to spare. I’d like very much to feel that foolish. You?”

“Yeah.” He liked the chasms. It didn’t mean he wanted to risk a highstorm in one of them. “You don’t have a map in that satchel, do you?”

“No,” Shallan said with a grimace. “I didn’t bring my own. Brightness Velat has the maps. I was using hers. But I might be able to remember some of what I’ve seen.”

“Then I think we should go this way,” Kaladin said, pointing. He started walking.

* * *

The bridgeman started walking off in the direction he’d pointed, not even giving her a chance to state her opinion on the matter. Shallan kept a huff to herself, snatching up her pack—she’d found some waterskins on the soldiers—and satchel. She hurried after him, her dress catching on something she hoped was a very white stick.

The tall bridgeman deftly stepped over and around debris, eyes forward. Why did he have to be the one who survived? Though to be honest, she was pleased to find anyone. Walking down here alone would not have been pleasant. At least he was superstitious enough to believe that he’d been saved by some twist of fate and spren. She had no idea how she’d saved herself, let alone him. Pattern rode on her skirts, and before she’d found the bridgeman, he’d been speculating that the Stormlight had kept her alive.

Alive after a fall of at least two hundred feet? It only proved how little she knew about her abilities. Stormfather! She’d saved this man too. She was sure of it; he’d been falling right beside her as they plummeted.

But how? And could she figure out how to do it again?

She hurried to keep up with him. Blasted Alethi and their freakishly long legs. He marched like a soldier, giving no thought to how she had to pick her way more carefully than he did. She didn’t want to get her skirt caught on every branch they passed.

They reached a pool of water on the chasm floor, and he hopped up onto a log that bridged the water, barely breaking stride as he crossed. She stopped at the edge.

He looked back at her, holding up a sphere. “You aren’t going to demand I give you my boots again, are you?”

She raised a foot, revealing the military-style boots she wore underneath her dress. That got him to cock an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t about to come out onto the Shattered Plains in slippers,” she said, blushing. “Besides, nobody can see your shoes under a dress this long.” She regarded the log.

“You want me to help you across?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m wondering how the trunk of a stumpweight tree got here,” she confessed. “They can’t possibly be native to this area of the Shattered Plains. Too cold out here. It might have grown along the coast, but a highstorm really carried it that far? Four hundred miles?”

“You’re not going to demand we stop for you to sketch a picture, are you?”

“Oh please,” Shallan said, stepping up onto the log and picking her way across. “Do you know how many sketches I have of stumpweights?”

The other things down here were a different matter entirely. As they continued on their way, Shallan used her sphere—which she had to juggle in her freehand, trying to manage it along with the satchel in her safehand and the pack over her shoulder—to illuminate her surroundings. They were stunning. Dozens of different varieties of vines, frillblooms of red, orange, and violet. Tiny rockbuds on the walls, and haspers in little clusters, opening and closing their shells as if breathing.

Motes of lifespren drifted around a patch of shalebark that grew in knobby patterns like fingers. You almost never saw that formation above. The tiny glowing specks of green light drifted through the chasm toward an entire wall of fist-size tube plants with little feelers wiggling out the top. As Shallan passed, the feelers retracted in a wave running up the wall. She gasped softly and took a Memory.

The bridgeman stopped ahead of her, turning. “Well?”

“Don’t you even notice how beautiful it is?”

He looked up at the wall of tube plants. She was certain she’d read about those somewhere, but the name escaped her.

The bridgeman continued on his way.

Shallan jogged after him, pack thumping against her back. She almost tripped over a snarled pile of dead vines and sticks as she reached him. She cursed, hopping on one foot to stay upright before steadying herself.

He reached out and took the pack from her.

Finally, she thought. “Thank you.”

He grunted, slipping it over his shoulder before continuing on without another word. They reached a crossroads in the chasms, a path going right and another going left. They’d have to weave around the next plateau before them to continue westward. Shallan looked up at the rift—getting a good picture in her mind of how this side of the plateau looked—as Kaladin chose one of the paths.

“This is going to take a while,” he said. “Even longer than it took to get out here. We had to wait upon the whole army then, but we could also cut through the centers of the plateaus. Having to go around every one of them will add a lot to the trip.”

“Well, at least the companionship is pleasant.”

He eyed her.

“For you, I mean,” she added.

“Am I going to have to listen to you prattle all the way back?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I also intend to do some blathering, a little nattering, and the occasional gibber. But not too much, lest I overdo a good thing.”

“Great.”

“I’ve been practicing my burble,” she added.