POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin walks the last miles toward Hearthstone under a thin afternoon rain, Syl keeping pace as a ribbon of light at his shoulder. He has been four days at this. From Urithiru he had taken the Oathgate to the Shattered Plains and lifted from there bursting with Stormlight and carrying more in gems; he crossed roughly a thousand miles in half a day before his store ran out somewhere in Aladar's princedom, and the ninety miles since have eaten three. He has lost the race. The Everstorm arrived around noon. He spent it inside a tomb he cut for himself out of solid rock with Syl as his Shardblade, huddling against the wrongness of it, and his spheres came out dead.
The country here is the green he had nearly forgotten — barrel-sized rockbuds, three-foot grass that pulls down before him into burrows when he steps near, a dappling of lifespren above the field. He distrusts how easily an ambusher could vanish into that grass. As a boy he ran through fields like this with his brother playing catch-me. He does not let himself think where that road has led him.
Syl notices that his eyes have bled back to brown a few hours after the last summoning of his blade. She tries on a Vorin havah with her safehand properly covered, asks his opinion, gets a grunt and a "looks strange on you," then flickers off as a stormcloud to inspect a lurg on a stone — turning herself into a pale-blue version of the amphibian long enough to startle it away. She comes back as a girl in the air and asks whether he is excited to be home. He is not. He had needed to beat the storm here, and he has not.
Past a river that has to be Hobble's Brook and the stripped seeding-fields of Hobbleken, he crests the last lavis hill at dusk and looks down on Hearthstone itself. Some of the houses he remembers are gone outright. Others stand without roofs. He can see no light in the town. A part of him huddles in on itself; he had taken his power, taken the path of a Radiant, and it had not been enough. He cannot bear, yet, to walk to where his own family's house should be.
Instead he rounds the town for the citylord's manor on the rise behind it — where Brightlord Roshone would have kept the local parshmen who would have begun the killing here. He half hopes to find Roshone's broken body. Thinking of Roshone turns him to Moash, whose betrayal of the king he has not yet figured out how to face.
Syl sees a gloomspren winding around him — a long grey streamer, rare for a feeling that is not rare at all — and apropos that, surfaces a new fragment of her returning past: an honorspren she used to call an aunt who hunted such things the way one hunts greatshells. She had not remembered her until tonight. The longer she stays with him, she says, the more comes back to her.
Then he sees it: light through boarded windows of the manor, candles or lanterns inside, shapes moving across them. The porch is torn away; the roof remains. Whoever — or whatever — survived the storm and what followed is still here. Kaladin catches himself wanting it to be Voidbringers and the wanting to be reckless about it, then forces caution back into himself and creeps off the path along the manor's northern side toward the servants' entrance and the parshman quarters built into the manor's shadow.
The parshmen's outbuilding has a hole ripped in its side and is empty. Behind him the warped back door of the manor grinds open and a lantern bathes him as he ducks behind a shalebark mound. The figure that steps out is no Voidbringer but a human guardsman in an old rusting helm, fumbling for the mace at his belt and shouting at him to come into the light. Kaladin stretches a hand to summon Syl, then stops. He stands instead, raises empty hands — unarmed but for her — and lets the man bully him toward the doorway. At least someone has survived.