Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

She gave him a weak smile.

“We’ll need to stop for the night,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s not just you,” he said, looking up at the sky. “I honestly have no idea if we’re going the right direction or not. I’m all turned around. If we can get an idea in the morning of where the sun is rising, it will tell us which direction to walk.”

She nodded.

“We should still be able to get back in plenty of time,” he added. “No need to worry.”

The way he said it immediately made her start worrying. Still, she helped him find a relatively dry portion of ground, and they settled down, spheres in the center like a little mock fire. Kaladin dug in the pack she’d found—she’d taken it off a dead soldier—and came out with some rations of flatbread and dried chull jerky. Not the most appetizing of food by any stretch, but it was something.

She sat with her back to the wall and ate, looking upward. The flatbread was from Soulcast grain—that stale taste was obvious. Clouds above prevented her from seeing the stars, but some starspren moved in front of those, forming distant patterns.

“It’s strange,” she whispered as Kaladin ate. “I’ve only been down here half a night, but it feels like so much longer. The tops of the plateaus seem so distant, don’t they?”

He grunted.

“Ah yes,” she said. “The bridgeman grunt. A language unto itself. I’ll need to go over the morphemes and tones with you; I’m not quite fluent yet.”

“You’d make a terrible bridgeman.”

“Too short?”

“Well, yes. And too female. I doubt you’d look good in the traditional short trousers and open vest. Or, rather, you’d probably look too good. It might be a little distracting for the other bridgemen.”

She smiled at that, digging into her satchel and pulling out her sketchbook and pencils. At least she had fallen with those. She started sketching, humming softly to herself and stealing one of the spheres for light. Pattern still lay on her skirts, content to be silent in Kaladin’s presence.

“Storms,” Kaladin said. “You’re not drawing a picture of you wearing one of those outfits…”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m drawing salacious pictures of myself for you after only a few hours together in the chasm.” She scratched at a line. “You have quite the imagination, bridgeboy.”

“Well it’s what we were talking about,” he grumbled, rising and walking over to look at what she was doing. “I thought you were tired.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “So I need to relax.” Obviously. This first sketch wouldn’t be the chasmfiend. She needed a warm-up.

So she drew their path through the chasms. A map, kind of, but more a picture of the chasms as if she could see them from above. It was imaginative enough to be interesting, though she was certain she got a few of the ridges and corners wrong.

“What is that?” Kaladin asked. “A picture of the Plains?”

“Something of a map,” she said, though she grimaced. What did it say about her that she couldn’t just draw a few lines giving their location, like a regular person? She had to do it like a picture. “I don’t know the full shapes of the plateaus we walked around, just the chasm pathways we used.”

“You remember it that well?”

Stormwinds. Hadn’t she intended to keep her visual memory more secret than this? “Uh… No, not really. I’m guessing at a lot of this.”

She felt foolish for revealing her skill. Veil would have had words with her. It was too bad Veil wasn’t down here, actually. She would be better at this whole surviving-in-the-wilderness thing.

Kaladin took the picture from her fingers, standing up and using his sphere to light it. “Well, if your map is correct, we’ve been making our way southward instead of westward. I need light to navigate better.”

“Perhaps,” she said, taking out another sheet to begin her sketch of the chasmfiend.

“We’ll wait for the sun tomorrow,” he said. “That will tell me which way to go.”

She nodded, beginning her sketch as he made a place for himself and settled down, coat folded into a pillow. She wanted to turn in herself, but this sketch would not wait. She at least had to get something down.

She only lasted about a half hour—finishing perhaps a quarter of the sketch—before she had to put it away, curl up on the hard ground with the pack as a pillow, and fall asleep.

* * *

It was still dark when Kaladin nudged her awake with the butt of his spear. Shallan groaned, rolling over on the chasm floor, and drowsily tried to put her pillow over her head.

Which, of course, spilled dried chull meat onto her. Kaladin chuckled.

Sure, that got a laugh out of him. Storming man. How long had she been able to sleep? She blinked bleary eyes and focused on the open crack of the chasm far above.

Nope, not a single glimmer of light. Two, perhaps three hours of sleep, then? Or, rather, “sleep.” The definition of what she’d done was debatable. She’d probably have called it “tossing and turning on the rocky ground, occasionally waking with a start to find that she’d drooled a small puddle.” That didn’t really roll off the tongue, though. Unlike the aforementioned drool.

She sat up and stretched sore limbs, checking to make sure her sleeve hadn’t come unbuttoned in the night or anything equally embarrassing. “I need a bath,” she grumbled.

“A bath?” Kaladin asked. “You have only been away from civilization for one day.”

She sniffed. “Just because you’re accustomed to the stench of unwashed bridgeman does not mean I need to join in.”

He smirked, taking a piece of dried chull meat from her shoulder and popping it in his mouth. “In my home town growing up, bath day was once a week. I think even the local lighteyes would have found it strange that everyone out here, even the common soldiers, finds a bath more frequently.”

How dare he be this chipper in the morning? Or, rather, the “morning.” She threw another piece of chull meat at him when he wasn’t looking. The storming man caught it.

I hate him.

“We didn’t get eaten by that chasmfiend while we slept,” he said, refilling the pack save for a single waterskin. “I’d say that was about as much a blessing as we could expect, under the circumstances. Come on, up on your toes. Your map gives me an idea of which way to go, and we can watch for sunlight to make certain we’re on the right path. We want to beat that highstorm, right?”

“You’re the one I want to beat,” she grumbled. “With a stick.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” she said, standing up and trying to make something of her frazzled hair. Storms. She must look like the aftereffect of a lightning bolt hitting a jar of red ink. She sighed. She didn’t have a brush, and he didn’t look like he was going to give her time for a proper braid, so she put on her boots—wearing the same pair of socks two days in a row was the least of her indignities—and picked up her satchel. Kaladin carried the pack.

She trailed after him as he led the way through the chasm, her stomach complaining about how little she’d eaten the night before. Food didn’t sound good, so she let it growl. Serves it right, she thought. Whatever that meant.