Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

“Chasmfiends don’t fly.”

“They kind of do, mathematically. Bavamar did the calculations on Reshi greatshells, and found they should be crushed by their own weight.”

“Huh,” Kaladin said.

She started to get excited. “There’s more. Those mandras, they vanish sometimes. Their keepers call it ‘dropping.’ I think they must be getting pulled into the Physical Realm. It means you can never use only one mandra to pull a ship, no matter how small that ship. And you can’t take them—or most other spren—too far from human population centers on our side. They waste away and die for reasons people here don’t understand.”

“Huh. So what do they eat?”

“I’m not sure,” Shallan said. “Syl and Pattern talk about feeding off emotions, but there’s something else that…” She trailed off as Kaladin flipped to the next page in her notebook. It seemed like an attempt at drawing Captain Ico, but was incredibly juvenile. Basically just a stick figure.

“Did Adolin get hold of your sketchbook?” he asked.

She snatched the book from him and closed it. “I was just trying out a different style. Thanks for the water.”

“Yes, I had to walk all the way from over there. At least seven steps.”

“Easily ten,” Shallan said. “And on this precarious deck. Very dangerous.”

“Practically as bad as fighting the Fused.”

“Could have stubbed your toe. Or gotten a splinter. Or pitched over the side and been lost to the depths, buried by a thousand thousand beads and the weight of the souls of an infinite number of forgotten objects.”

“Or … that.”

“Highly unlikely,” Shallan agreed. “They keep this deck well maintained, so there really aren’t any splinters.”

“With my luck, I’d find one anyway.”

“I had a splinter once,” Shallan noted. “It eventually got out of hand.”

“You … you did not just say that.”

“Yes, you obviously imagined it. What a sick, sick mind you have, Kaladin.”

Kaladin sighed, then nodded to the sailors. “They do walk about barefoot. Have you noticed that? Something about the copper lines set into the deck.”

“The copper vibrates,” Shallan said. “And they keep touching it. I think they might be using it to communicate somehow.”

“That would explain why they don’t talk much,” Kaladin said. “I’d have expected them to watch us a little more than they do. They don’t seem that curious about us.”

“Which is odd, considering how interesting Azure is.”

“Wait. Just Azure?”

“Yes. In that polished breastplate and striking figure, with her talk of chasing bounties and traveling worlds. She’s deeply mysterious.”

“I’m mysterious,” Kaladin said.

“I used to think you were. Then I found out you don’t like good puns—it’s truly possible to know too much about somebody.”

He grunted. “I’ll try to be more mysterious. Take up bounty hunting.” His stomach growled. “Starting with a bounty on lunch, maybe.”

They’d been promised two meals a day, but considering how long it had taken Ico to remember they needed water, perhaps he should ask.

“I’ve been trying to track our speed,” Shallan said, flipping through her notebook. She went quickly through the pages, and he could see that—oddly—they alternated between expert renditions and comically bad ones.

She landed on a map she’d made of this region in Shadesmar. Alethi rivers were now peninsulas, and the Sea of Spears was an island, with the city named Celebrant on the western side. The river peninsulas meant that in order to get to the city, the ship had to swing to the west. Shallan had marked their path with a line.

“It’s hard to gauge our progress, but I’d guess that we’re moving faster than the average ship in our world. We can go directly where we want without worrying about the winds, for one thing.”

“So … two more days?” Kaladin asked, guessing based on her marks.

“More or less. Quick progress.”

He moved his fingers down, toward the bottom of her map. “Thaylen City?” he asked, tapping one point she’d marked.

“Yes. On this side, it will be on the edge of a lake of beads. We can guess the Oathgate will reflect there as a platform, like the one we left in Kholinar. But how to activate it…”

“I want to try. Dalinar is in danger. We need to get to him, Shallan. In Thaylen City.”

She glanced at Azure, who maintained that was the wrong direction to go. “Kaladin … I don’t know if we can trust what you saw. It’s dangerous to presume you know the future—”

“I didn’t see the future,” Kaladin said quickly. “It wasn’t like that. It was like soaring the sky with the Stormfather. I just know … I know I have to get to Dalinar.”

She still seemed skeptical. Perhaps he’d told them too much of the lighthouse keeper’s theatrics.

“We’ll see, once we get to Celebrant.” Shallan closed her map, then squirmed, glancing back at the railing they’d been leaning against. “Do you suppose they have chairs anywhere? These railings aren’t very comfortable for sitting against.”

“Probably not.”

“What do you even call these things?” Shallan said, tapping the railing. “A deck wall?”

“No doubt they’ve made up some obscure nautical word,” Kaladin said. “Everything on a ship has odd names. Port and starboard instead of left and right. Galley instead of kitchen. Nuisance instead of Shallan.”

“There was a name … railing? Deck guard? No, wale. It’s called a wale.” She grinned. “I don’t really like how it feels to sit against this wale, but I’m sure I’ll eventually get over it.”

He groaned softly. “Really?”

“Vengeance for calling me names.”

“Name. One name. And it was more a declaration of fact than an attack.”

She punched him lightly in the arm. “It’s good to see you smiling.”

“That was smiling?”

“It was the Kaladin equivalent. That scowl was almost jovial.” She smiled at him.

Something felt warm within him at being near her. Something felt right. It wasn’t like with Laral, his boyhood crush. Or even like with Tarah, his first real romance. It was something different, and he couldn’t define it. He only knew he didn’t want it to stop. It pushed back the darkness.

“Down in the chasms,” he said, “when we were trapped together, you talked about your life. About … your father.”

“I remember,” she said softly. “In the darkness of the storm.”

“How do you do it, Shallan? How do you keep smiling and laughing? How do you keep from fixating on the terrible things that have happened?”

“I cover them up. I have this uncanny ability to hide away anything I don’t want to think about. It … it’s getting harder, but for most things I can just…” She trailed off, staring straight ahead. “There. Gone.”