Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive 4)

She soared back toward Urithiru, weaving between snowbanks, then shooting upward. This section to the west of the tower included deep valleys and frosted peaks. She dove through the former and crested the latter before looping around in circles outside the magnificent tower.

She eventually reached the Bondsmith’s balcony. Dalinar was always awake for highstorms, regardless of the hour. She landed on his balcony, where he stood in the cold. The rock at his feet was slick with water; today the highstorm had been high enough to cover the lower stories of the tower. She’d never seen it get to the top, but she hoped it would someday. That would be different!

She made herself visible to Dalinar, but he didn’t jump as humans sometimes did when she appeared. She didn’t understand why they did that—weren’t they used to spren fading in and out all the time around them? Humans were like storms, magnets for all kinds of spren.

They seemed to find her more disturbing than a gloryspren. She supposed she’d take that as a compliment.

“Did you enjoy your storm, Ancient Daughter?” Dalinar asked.

“I enjoyed our storm,” she said. “Though Kaladin slept through the entire thing, the big lug.”

“Good. He needs more rest.”

She took a step toward Dalinar. “Thank you for what you did. In forcing him to change. He was stuck, doing what he felt he had to, but getting darker all the time.”

“Every soldier reaches a point where he has to set down the sword. Part of a commander’s job is to watch for the signs.”

“He’s different, isn’t he?” Syl said. “Worse, because his own mind fights against him.”

“Different, yes,” Dalinar said, leaning on the railing next to her. “But who is to say what is worse or better? We each have our own Voidbringers to slay, Brightness Sylphrena. No man can judge another man’s heart or trials, for no man can truly know them.”

“I want to try,” she said. “The Stormfather implied there was a way. Can you make me understand Kaladin’s emotions? Can you make me feel what he’s going through?”

“I have no idea how to accomplish something like that,” Dalinar said.

“He and I have a bond,” she said. “You should be able to use your powers to enhance that bond, strengthen it.”

Dalinar clasped his hands on the stonework before him. He didn’t object to her request—he wasn’t the type to reject any idea out of hand.

“What do you know of my powers?” Dalinar asked her.

“Your abilities are what made the original Oathpact,” she said. “And they existed—and were named—long before the Knights Radiant were founded. A Bondsmith Connected the Heralds to Braize, made them immortal, and locked our enemies away. A Bondsmith bound other Surges and brought humans to Roshar, fleeing their dying world. A Bondsmith created—or at least discovered—the Nahel bond: the ability of spren and humans to join together into something better. You Connect things, Dalinar. Realms. Ideas. People.”

He surveyed the frosted landscape, freshly painted with snow. She thought she knew his answer already, from the way he took a breath and set his jaw before speaking.

“Even if I could do this,” he said, “it would not be right.”

She became a small pile of leaves, disintegrating and stirring in the wind. “Then I’ll never be able to help him.”

“You can help without knowing exactly what he’s feeling. You can be available for him to lean on.”

“I try. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to want even me.”

“That’s likely when he needs you most. We can never know another man’s heart, Brightness Sylphrena, but we all know what it is to live and have pain. That is the advice I’d have given to another. I do not know if it applies to you.”

Syl looked upward, along the tower’s pointing finger, raised toward the sky. “I … had another knight once. We came here to the tower, when it was alive—though I don’t fully remember what that meant. I lost memories during the … pain.”

“What pain?” Dalinar asked. “What pain does a spren feel?”

“He died. My knight, Relador. He went to fight, despite his age. He shouldn’t have, and when he was killed, it hurt. I felt alone. So alone that I started to drift…”

Dalinar nodded. “I suspect that Kaladin feels something similar, though from what I’ve been told about his ailment, it doesn’t have a specific cause. He will sometimes start to … drift, as you put it.”

“The dark brain,” she said.

“An apt designation.”

Maybe I can already understand Kaladin, she thought. I had a dark brain of my own, for a while.

She had to remember what that had been like. She realized that her responsible brain and her child’s brain aligned in trying hard to forget that part of her life. But Syl was in control, not either of those brains. And maybe, if she remembered how she’d felt during those old dark days, she could help Kaladin with his current dark days.

“Thank you,” she said to Dalinar as a group of windspren passed. She regarded them, and for once didn’t particularly feel like giving chase. “I think you have helped.”

Sja-anat had been named Taker of Secrets long ago by a scholar no one remembered. She liked the name. It implied action. She didn’t simply hear secrets; she took them. She made them hers.

And she kept them.

From the other Unmade.

From the Fused.

From Odium himself.

She flowed through the Kholinar palace, existing between the Physical and Cognitive Realms. Like many of the Unmade, she belonged to neither one fully. Odium trapped them in a halfway existence. Some would manifest in various forms if they resided too long in one place, or if they were pulled through by strong emotions.

Not her.

Sometimes Fused, or even common singers, would notice her. They’d grow stiff, look over their shoulders. They’d glimpse a shadow, a brief darkness, quickly missed. Actually seeing her required reflected light.

It was similar in Shadesmar. She experienced that realm at the same time as she experienced the Physical Realm, though both were shadowy to her. She dreamed that somewhere a place existed that was completely right for her and her children.

For now, she would live here.

She flowed up steps in one realm, but barely moved in the other. Space was not entirely equal between the realms—it wasn’t that she had a foot in each realm; more, she was like two entities that shared a mind. In Shadesmar, she floated above the ocean of beads, her essence rippling. In the Physical Realm, she passed among singers who worked in the palace.

Sja-anat did not consider herself the most clever of the Unmade. Certainly she was one of the more intelligent, but that was not the same. Some of the Unmade—such as Nergaoul, sometimes called the Thrill—were practically mindless, more like emotion spren. Others—such as Ba-Ado-Mishram, who had granted forms to the singers during the False Desolation—were crafty and conniving.

Sja-anat was a little like both. During the long millennia before this Return, she’d mostly slumbered. Without her bond to Odium she had trouble thinking. The Everstorm appearing in Shadesmar—long before it had emerged into the Physical Realm—had revitalized her. Had let her begin planning again. But she knew she was not as smart as Odium was. She could keep only a few secrets from him, and she had to choose carefully, clouding them behind other secrets that she gave away.