Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

“Go that way,” Syl said, a ribbon of light.

“Why?”

“Just listen to the piece of nature incarnate, okay? I think Father wants to apologize, in his own way.”

Kaladin growled, but allowed the winds to channel him in a specific direction. He flew this way for hours, lost in the sounds of the tempest, until finally he settled down—half of his own volition, half because of the pressing winds. The storm passed—leaving him in the middle of a large, open field of rock.

The plateau in front of the tower city of Urithiru.

For I, of all people, have changed.

—From Oathbringer, preface

Shallan settled in Sebarial’s sitting room. It was a strangely shaped stone chamber with a loft above—he sometimes put musicians there—and a shallow cavity in the floor, which he kept saying he was going to fill with water and fish. She was fairly certain he made claims like that just to annoy Dalinar with his supposed extravagance.

For now, they’d covered the hole with some boards, and Sebarial would periodically warn people not to step on them. The rest of the room was decorated lavishly. She was pretty sure she’d seen those tapestries in a monastery in Dalinar’s warcamp, and they were matched by luxurious furniture, golden lamps, and ceramics.

And a bunch of splintery boards covering a pit. She shook her head. Then—curled up on a sofa with blankets heaped over her—she gladly accepted a cup of steaming citrus tea from Palona. She still hadn’t been able to rid herself of the lingering chill she’d felt since her encounter with Re-Shephir a few hours back.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Palona asked.

Shallan shook her head, so the Herdazian woman settled herself on a sofa nearby, holding another cup of tea. Shallan sipped, glad for the company. Adolin had wanted her to sleep, but the last thing she wanted was to be alone. He’d handed her over to Palona’s care, then stayed with Dalinar and Navani to answer their further questions.

“So…” Palona said. “What was it like?”

How to answer that? She’d touched the storming Midnight Mother. A name from ancient lore, one of the Unmade, princes of the Voidbringers. People sang about Re-Shephir in poetry and epics, describing her as a dark, beautiful figure. Paintings depicted her as a black-clad woman with red eyes and a sultry gaze.

That seemed to exemplify how little they really remembered about these things.

“It wasn’t like the stories,” Shallan whispered. “Re-Shephir is a spren. A vast, terrible spren who wants so desperately to understand us. So she kills us, imitating our violence.”

There was a deeper mystery beyond that, a wisp of something she’d glimpsed while intertwined with Re-Shephir. It made Shallan wonder if this spren wasn’t merely trying to understand humankind, but rather searching for something it itself had lost.

Had this creature—in distant, distant time beyond memory—once been human?

They didn’t know. They didn’t know anything. At Shallan’s first report, Navani had set her scholars searching for information, but their access to books here was still limited. Even with access to the Palanaeum, Shallan wasn’t optimistic. Jasnah had hunted for years to find Urithiru, and even then most of what she’d discovered had been unreliable. It had simply been too many years.

“To think it was here, all this time,” Palona said. “Hiding down there.”

“She was captive,” Shallan whispered. “She eventually escaped, but that was centuries ago. She has been waiting here ever since.”

“Well, we should find where the others are held, and make sure they don’t get out.”

“I don’t know if the others were ever captured.” She’d felt isolation and loneliness from Re-Shephir, a sense of being torn away while the others escaped.

“So…”

“They’re out there, and always have been,” Shallan said. She felt exhausted, and her eyes were drooping in direct defiance of her insistence to Adolin that she was not that kind of tired.

“Surely we’d have discovered them by now.”

“I don’t know,” Shallan said. “They’ll … they’ll just be normal to us. The way things have always been.”

She yawned, then nodded absently as Palona continued talking, her comments degenerating into praise of Shallan for acting as she had. Adolin had been the same way, which she hadn’t minded, and Dalinar had been downright nice to her—instead of being his usual stern rock of a human being.

She didn’t tell them how near she’d come to breaking, and how terrified she was that she might someday meet that creature again.

But … maybe she did deserve some acclaim. She’d been a child when she’d left her home, seeking salvation for her family. For the first time since that day on the ship, watching Jah Keved fade behind her, she felt like she actually might have a handle on all of this. Like she might have found some stability in her life, some control over herself and her surroundings.

Remarkably, she kind of felt like an adult.

She smiled and snuggled into her blankets, drinking her tea and—for the moment—putting out of her mind that basically an entire troop of soldiers had seen her with her glove off. She was kind of an adult. She could deal with a little embarrassment. In fact, she was increasingly certain that between Shallan, Veil, and Radiant, she could deal with anything life could throw at her.

A disturbance outside made her sit up, though it didn’t sound dangerous. Some chatter, a few boisterous exclamations. She wasn’t terribly surprised when Adolin stepped in, bowed to Palona—he did have nice manners—and jogged over to her, his uniform still rumpled from having worn Shardplate over it.

“Don’t panic,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

“It?” she said, growing alarmed.

“Well, someone just arrived at the tower.”

“Oh, that. Sebarial passed the news; the bridgeboy is back.”

“Him? No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” Adolin searched for words as voices approached, and several other people stepped into the room.

At their head was Jasnah Kholin.

THE END OF

Part One

Puuli the lighthouse keeper tried not to let everyone know how excited he was for this new storm.

It was truly tragic. Truly tragic. He told Sakin this as she wept. She had thought herself quite high and blessed when she’d landed her new husband. She’d moved into the man’s fine stone hut in a prime spot for growing a garden, behind the northern cliffs of the town.

Puuli gathered scraps of wood blown eastward by the strange storm, and piled them in his little cart. He pulled it with two hands, leaving Sakin to weep for her husband. Up to three now, she was, all lost at sea. Truly tragic.

Still, he was excited for the storm.

He pulled his cart past other broken homes here, where they should have been sheltered west of the cliffs. Puuli’s grandfather had been able to remember when those cliffs hadn’t been there. Kelek himself had broken apart the land in the middle of a storm, making a new prime spot for homes.

Where would the rich people put their houses now?

And they did have rich people here in town, never mind what the travelers on the ocean said. Those would stop at this little port, on the crumbling eastern edge of Roshar, and shelter from storms in their cove alongside the cliffs.