POV: kaladin
Summary
In Vamah lands, Kaladin talks an elderly lighteyed waystop merchant into renting them his storm bunker for the coming highstorm and selling him three sacks of vegetables on top of it. He passes himself off as a Kholin corporal traveling ahead of a fastidiously private brightlord — a story whose chief virtue is that it makes the truth (a Kholin officer running with a band of escaped parshmen) the last thing anyone will guess. The old man — sixth dahn and proud of it — tips him off that wild hogs have been rooting in a ravine to the south on Highlord Cadilar's land (poach at your risk), and confirms that three caravans out of Revolar are mysteriously overdue, not even a runner come ahead with word. Revolar is the seat of Vamah and the largest city between this stop and Kholinar; the silence is *storming strange.* Kaladin pays in dun spheres, secures his privacy with a hand on his belt knife — the merchant sniffs and shuts the stormshutters anyway — and hauls the food back to the band.
Khen, Sah, and the others — now verging on a hundred parshmen including children and elderly, picked up from other groups along the way under guidance of unseen Voidspren — wanted to wait for dark to enter, untrusting of the old man, but the wind has risen and finally they believe Kaladin when he says a storm is on the way. The Everstorm's second known occurrence hit the previous day; they weathered that one in a mine on warning from the unseen spren. They file inside. Khen takes their spheres — most of them stolen from Kaladin — and locks the sack into the iron-banded lantern on the wall outside to renew, then bars the door. *You did well, human,* she says, and promises to speak for him *when we reach the gathering.* Outside, the stormwall cracks against the bunker and the ground shakes.
The band settles in to wait. Hesh, who once worked a manor's kitchen, inspects the vegetables with a critical eye. Kaladin sits against the wall and listens to the storm rage and thinks how strange it is that he hated the mild Weeping so much yet feels a thrill at thunder beyond the stones — a kinship and a wariness both, the way one feels toward a brutal training sergeant. The spheres outside will be renewed; their gemstones too, including the larger ones he has been carrying — and once renewed, *he* (no, *the parshmen*) will have a wealth of Stormlight. He cannot dally forever. What is happening at Urithiru? What is the word from the world? Once he worried only about his squad, then a battalion; since when did the state of the whole world become his concern? He resolves to at least steal back the spanreed and send word to Brightness Navani.
Something flickers at the edge of his vision; he turns expecting Syl returned and barely catches himself. The spren beside him is glowing yellow rather than blue-white, a tiny woman on a translucent gold pillar that rose from the ground to put her at his eye level. Her face is narrow and her eyes very large, Shin-like; she wears a long dress that hides her legs and holds her hands behind her back. Spikes of yellow stone rise up under her bare feet at each step she takes around him.
She wants to talk. Kaladin plays ignorant about what she is. *Why are you still here, human?* He gives her Khen's capture story; she laughs at him — *your mother teach you to lie like that?* — and observes that her parshmen are less than a month old. Less than a month, and *she* is rather older. He pivots — the country is in upheaval; he wants to see where this goes. She studies him. *Would you fight for us, deserter?* He asks if he would be allowed; she answers that her kind discriminate less than his, and a man who can carry a spear and take orders would not be turned away — though the final decision is not hers. She is only a messenger. The certainty will come *at our destination*, which she will not name; he can find out, she says, when they get *close enough.* She asks how he knew there would be a highstorm tonight; he says he felt it in his bones. *Humans cannot feel storms, regardless of the body part in question.* He shrugs it off, blames the Weeping's lifting. She holds her knowing smile and fades from view, leaving him with the sweat trickling down the side of his face and one of his hands at the prickle of forming beard, very aware that he has not fooled her.