Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

Tuaka rubbed Lunamor’s back, then knelt down beside him, pulling their daughter close with one arm, Lunamor with the other. “It was a long journey,” she said in Unkalaki, “and longest at the end, when those things came from the sky.”

“I should have come to the warcamps,” Lunamor said. “To escort you.”

“We’re here now,” she said. “Lunamor, what happened? Your note was so terse. Kef’ha is dead, but what happened to you? Why so long without word?”

He bowed his head. How could he explain this? The bridge runs, the cracks in his soul. How could he explain that the man she’d always said was so strong had wished to die? Had been a coward, had given up, near the end?

“What of Tifi and Sinaku’a?” she asked him.

“Dead,” he whispered. “They raised weapons in vengeance.”

She put her hand to her lips. She wore a glove on her safehand, in deference to silly Vorin traditions. “Then you—”

“I am a chef now,” Lunamor said, firm.

“But—”

“I cook, Tuaka.” He pulled her close again. “Come, let us take the children to safety. We will reach the tower, which you will like—it is like the Peaks, almost. I will tell you stories. Some are painful.”

“Very well. Lunamor, I have stories too. The Peaks, our home … something is wrong. Very wrong.”

He pulled back and met her eyes. They’d call her darkeyed down here, though he found infinite depth, beauty, and light in those deep brown-green eyes.

“I will explain when we are safe,” she promised, picking up little Beautiful Song. “You are wise to usher us forward. Wise as ever.”

“No, my love,” he whispered. “I am a fool. I would blame the air, but I was a fool above too. A fool to ever let Kef’ha leave on this errand of stupidity.”

She walked the children across the bridge. He watched, and was glad to hear Unkalaki again, a proper language. Glad that the other men did not speak it. For if they did, they might have picked out the lies that he had told them.

Kaladin stepped up, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’m going to assign your family my rooms, Rock. I’ve been slow in getting family quarters for the bridgemen. This will light a fire under me. I’ll get us an assignment, and until then I’ll bunk with the rest of the men.”

Lunamor opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. Some days, the more honorable thing was to take a gift without complaint. “Thank you,” he said. “For the rooms. For other things, my captain.”

“Go walk with your family, Rock. We can handle the bridge without you today. We have Stormlight.”

Lunamor rested his fingers on the smooth wood. “No,” he said. “It will be a privilege to carry him one last time, for my family.”

“One last time?” Kaladin said.

“We take to the skies, Stormblessed,” Lunamor said. “We will walk no more in coming days. This is the end.” He looked back toward a subdued Bridge Four group, who seemed to sense that what he said was true. “Ha! Do not look so sad. I left great stew back near city. Hobber will probably not ruin it before we return. Come! Pick up our bridge. The last time, we march not toward death, but toward full stomachs and good songs!”

Despite his urging, it was a solemn, respectful group who lifted the bridge. They were slaves no longer. Storms, in their pockets they carried riches! It glowed fiercely, and soon their skin did as well.

Kaladin took his place at the front. Together they carried the bridge on one final run—reverently, as if it were the bier of a king, being taken to his tomb for his eternal rest.

Your skills are admirable, but you are merely a man. You had your chance to be more, and refused it.

Dalinar entered the next vision in the middle of a fight.

He had learned his lesson; he didn’t intend to mire another person in an unexpected battle. This time he intended to find a safe point, then bring people in.

That meant appearing as he had many months ago: holding a spear in sweaty hands, standing on a forlorn and broken plate of rock, surrounded by men in primitive clothing. They wore wraps of rough-spun lavis fibers and sandals of hogshide, and carried spears with bronze heads. Only the officer wore armor: a mere leather jerkin, not even properly hardened. It had been cured, then cut roughly into the shape of a vest. It proved no help against an axe to the face.

Dalinar roared, indistinctly remembering his first time in this vision. It had been one of the very earliest, when he still discounted them as nightmares. Today, he intended to tease out its secrets.

He charged the enemy, a group of men in similarly shoddy clothing. Dalinar’s companions had backed themselves up to the edge of a cliff. If they didn’t fight now, they’d be pushed off onto a steep incline that eventually ended in a sheer drop and a plummet of some fifty or sixty feet to the bottom of a valley.

Dalinar rammed into the enemy group trying to push his men off the cliff. He wore the same clothing as the others, carried their weapons, but had brought one oddity: a pouch full of gemstones tucked at his waist.

He gutted one enemy with his spear, then shoved the fellow toward the others: thirty or so men with ragged beards and callous eyes. Two tripped over their dying friend, which protected Dalinar’s flank for a moment. He seized the fallen man’s axe, then attacked to his left.

The enemy resisted, howling. These men weren’t well trained, but any fool with a sharpened edge could be dangerous. Dalinar cut, slashed, laid about himself with the axe—which was well balanced, a good weapon. He was confident he could beat this group.

Two things went wrong. First, the other spearmen didn’t support him. Nobody filled in behind to protect him from being surrounded.

Second, the wild men didn’t flinch.

Dalinar had come to rely on the way soldiers pulled away when they saw him fighting. He depended on their discipline to fail—even when he hadn’t been a Shardbearer, he’d counted on his ferocity, his sheer momentum, to win fights.

Turned out, the momentum of one man—no matter how skilled or determined—amounted to little when running into a stone wall. The men before him didn’t bend, didn’t panic, didn’t so much as quiver as he killed four of them. They struck at him with increased ferocity. One even laughed.

In a flash, his arm was chopped by an axe he didn’t even see, then he was shoved over by the rush of the attackers. Dalinar hit the ground, stunned, looking with disbelief at the stump of his left forearm. The pain seemed a disconnected thing, distant. Only a single painspren, like a hand made of sinew, appeared by his knees.

Dalinar felt a shattering, humbling sense of his own mortality. Was this what every veteran felt, when he finally fell on the battlefield? This bizarre, surreal sense of both disbelief and long-buried resignation?

Dalinar set his jaw, then used his good hand to pull free the leather strap he was using for a belt. Holding one end in his teeth, he wrapped it around the stump of his arm right above the elbow. The cut wasn’t bleeding too badly yet. Took a moment for a wound like this to bleed; the body constricted blood flow at first.

Storms. This blow had gone clean through. He reminded himself that this wasn’t his actual flesh exposed to the air. That it wasn’t his own bone there, like the center ring of a hunk of pork.