Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

“No,” Kaladin said immediately, then hesitated. “Maybe. It just feels strange.”

She sniffed. “You don’t ask your other weapons how they feel about being swung about.”

“My other weapons aren’t people.” He hesitated. “Are they?”

She looked at him with head cocked and eyebrows raised, as if he’d said something very stupid.

Everything has a spren. His mother had taught him that from an early age.

“So … some of my spears have been women, then?” he asked.

“Female, at least,” Syl said. “Roughly half, as these things tend to go.” She flitted up into the air in front of him. “It’s your fault for personifying us, so no complaining. Of course, some of the old spren have four genders instead of two.”

“What? Why?”

She poked him in the nose. “Because humans didn’t imagine those ones, silly.” She zipped out in front of him, changing into a field of mist. When he raised his hand, the Shardblade appeared.

He strode to where Roshone sat, then stooped down and held the Shardblade before the man, point toward the floor.

Roshone looked up, transfixed by the weapon’s blade, as Kaladin had anticipated. You couldn’t be near one of these things and not be drawn by it. They had a magnetism.

“How did you get it?” Roshone asked.

“Does it matter?”

He didn’t reply, but they both knew the truth. Owning a Shardblade was enough—if you could claim it, and not have it taken from you, it was yours. With one in his possession, the brands on his head were meaningless. No man, not even Roshone, would imply otherwise.

“You,” Kaladin said, “are a cheat, a rat, and a murderer. But as much as I hate it, we don’t have time to oust Alethkar’s ruling class and set up something better. We are under attack by an enemy we do not understand, and which we could not have anticipated. So you’re going to have to stand up and lead these people.”

Roshone stared at the blade, looking at his reflection.

“We’re not powerless,” Kaladin said. “We can and will fight back—but first we need to survive. The Everstorm will return. Regularly, though I don’t know the interval yet. I need you to prepare.”

“How?” Roshone whispered.

“Build homes with slopes in both directions. If there’s not time for that, find a sheltered location and hunker down. I can’t stay. This crisis is bigger than one town, one people, even if it’s my town and my people. I have to rely on you. Almighty preserve us, you’re all we have.”

Roshone slumped down farther in his seat. Great. Kaladin stood and dismissed Syl.

“We’ll do it,” a voice said from behind him.

Kaladin froze. Laral’s voice sent a shiver down his spine. He turned slowly, and found a woman who did not at all match the image in his head. When he’d last seen her, she’d been wearing a perfect lighteyed dress, beautiful and young, yet her pale green eyes had seemed hollow. She’d lost her betrothed, Roshone’s son, and had instead become engaged to the father—a man more than twice her age.

The woman he confronted was no longer a youth. Her face was firm, lean, and her hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense tail of black peppered with blonde. She wore boots and a utilitarian havah, damp from the rain.

She looked him up and down, then sniffed. “Looks like you went and grew up, Kal. I was sorry to hear the news of your brother. Come now. You need a spanreed? I’ve got one to the queen regent in Kholinar, but that one hasn’t been responsive lately. Fortunately, we do have one to Tashikk, as you asked about. If you think that the king will respond to you, we can go through an intermediary.”

She walked back out the doorway.

“Laral…” he said, following.

“I hear you stabbed my floor,” she noted. “That’s good hardwood, I’ll have you know. Honestly. Men and their weapons.”

“I dreamed of coming back,” Kaladin said, stopping in the hallway outside the library. “I imagined returning here a war hero and challenging Roshone. I wanted to save you, Laral.”

“Oh?” She turned back to him. “And what made you think I needed saving?”

“You can’t tell me,” Kaladin said softly, waving backward toward the library, “that you’ve been happy with that.”

“Becoming a lighteyes does not grant a man any measure of decorum, it appears,” Laral said. “You will stop insulting my husband, Kaladin. Shardbearer or not, another word like that, and I’ll have you thrown from my home.”

“Laral—”

“I am quite happy here. Or I was, until the winds started blowing the wrong direction.” She shook her head. “You take after your father. Always feeling like you need to save everyone, even those who would rather you mind your own business.”

“Roshone brutalized my family. He sent my brother to his death and did everything he could to destroy my father!”

“And your father spoke against my husband,” Laral said, “disparaging him in front of the other townspeople. How would you feel, as a new brightlord exiled far from home, only to find that the town’s most important citizen is openly critical of you?”

Her perspective was skewed, of course. Lirin had tried to befriend Roshone at first, hadn’t he? Still, Kaladin found little passion to continue the argument. What did he care? He intended to see his parents moved from this city anyway.

“I’ll go set up the spanreed,” she said. “It might take some time to get a reply. In the meantime, the ardents should be fetching your maps.”

“Great,” Kaladin said, pushing past her in the hallway. “I’m going to go speak with my parents.”

Syl zipped over his shoulder as he started down the steps. “So, that’s the girl you were going to marry.”

“No,” Kaladin whispered. “That’s a girl I was never going to marry, no matter what happened.”

“I like her.”

“You would.” He reached the bottom of the steps and looked back up. Roshone had joined Laral at the top of the stairs, carrying the gems Kaladin had left on the table. How much had that been?

Five or six ruby broams, he thought, and maybe a sapphire or two. He did the calculations in his head. Storms … That was a ridiculous sum—more money than the goblet full of spheres that Roshone and Kaladin’s father had spent years fighting over back in the day. That was now mere pocket change to Kaladin.

He’d always thought of all lighteyes as rich, but a minor brightlord in an insignificant town … well, Roshone was actually poor, just a different kind of poor.

Kaladin searched back through the house, passing people he’d once known—people who now whispered “Shardbearer” and got out of his way with alacrity. So be it. He’d accepted his place the moment he’d seized Syl from the air and spoken the Words.

Lirin was back in the parlor, working on the wounded again. Kaladin stopped in the doorway, then sighed and knelt beside Lirin. As the man reached toward his tray of tools, Kaladin picked it up and held it at the ready. His old position as his father’s surgery assistant. The new apprentice was helping with wounded in another room.