POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin has spent the night and most of the next day tied to a tree by the small band of awakened Hearthstone parshmen he turned himself in to. His muscles ache; he has endured worse as a slave. The Weeping has finally stopped, which means highstorms — and Stormlight — are coming back. From under their tarp the parshmen argue about him. Khen still wants him dead; the others, including the bearded card-player who took him, ask if she would actually bash his skull in. She says yes, before going back. The conversation has no leader.
As the sun sets the band breaks camp for the night's march. From the closed family tent a dozen parshman children spill out — toddlers to teens, the girls' hair loose and the boys' braided, all with the light orange-pink carapace of the not-quite-Parshendi young — and Kaladin realizes he had half-feared they were human captives. They are not. The bearded captor unties his ankles, leaves his hands bound, and tows him onto his feet; one little girl — the captor's daughter — runs out of the trees and seizes the man's free hand. Kaladin notes for the captor's benefit that the card-game squire *can* capture if backed by an allied card. The captor grunts; on the night march he asks softly about the king card. Kaladin explains: most powerful card on the board, lost the game if captured, so most players leave him in the barrack rather than play him.
The column moves through open country in the dark. Syl flits past as a windspren, oddly carefree, and refuses to land. The captor's small daughter scampers ahead by Mishim's green light to crouch beside a closed rockbud and snatch its blossoms the moment it reopens. Khen keeps watch with a cudgel and scolds the captor for falling behind.
Memory comes up under Kaladin's feet: this is what Tasinar had been, the most successful of his slave escapes, the one that had lasted five days. He has avoided thinking about those months — every failed person, Nalma among them, the rough feel of her hand in his — because remembering takes him to dark places. He says, mostly to himself, that these parshmen are not monsters and not soldiers and not even the seeds of the void. *You're just runaway slaves.*
His captor whirls and seizes him by the front of his uniform. *Look at my forehead*, Kaladin says — *slave brands.* He starts to claim that this makes him understand and is shouted down: the parshman has lived his life in a fog, every day knowing he ought to say or do something to stop these things, every night holding his daughter and wondering why the world moves in the light around him while he is trapped in shadows. They sold her mother for being good breeding stock and he could not find a word to stop it. *They may have taken your freedom, but they took our minds.* The captor drops him, gathers the daughter, jogs to catch the column; the daughter's flower is crushed under Kaladin's pulled feet.
Syl finally comes down to him long enough to whisper a hard piece of news. She thinks the parshmen can see her, at least some of them. *And that other spren is still here.* A higher spren, on the order of herself. She has so far fooled it into thinking she is just a windspren. It is, she says quietly when Kaladin presses her, Voidspren — from *him*. And there is more, she adds. The new storm has not just woken these parshmen; its power filled the holes in their souls. *Connection refounded, Identity restored.* When the parshmen's ancestors were conquered, humanity literally tore a piece off their souls and locked it away — that is why they could not change forms.
Kaladin tries, weakly, to offer his captor advice as they walk: stop following the river, break into smaller groups for the day, claim to passersby that you were sent somewhere by a lighteyes. The captor doesn't trust him and tells him so. Kaladin admits — truthfully — that he is no longer sure he wants them caught.
At the next halt the captor's small daughter timidly sets a waterskin near him, then comes back to ask the question only a child can. Will the humans really chase them? Why? *We're nice. We never hit anybody, even when we're mad.* He tries to explain about her ancestors and the war and gives up; how do you teach slavery to a seven-year-old? She runs the waterskin back to her father, who has noticed her absence and is watching Kaladin in silhouette.
Syl whispers from the crack in his rock that the Voidspren is away. Kaladin decides. *Let's cut this rope.* He turns and summons her as a knife; the change of eye-color is hidden by night. Then he refuses her offer to be a Blade to scatter the parshmen, and instead picks up a large rock, walks a few steps, and uses it to crush a rockbud. He digs out the dry inner shell and holds it up to the wary cudgel-wielding parshmen who have surrounded him. He explains how to scrape off the inner layer and reach the dry core. He explains how to dry their grain into cakes, how to keep their wood, how to shield a small fire among the trees. He asks for his knife back.
They give it. They take him to the trees, every cudgel in the camp on him, and demand that he prove he can build a fire from wet wood. He does just that.