POV: teft
Summary
Teft wakes in an alleyway between tents of the Breakaway market, soiled undershirt and no coat, head pounding and fingers raw from a night of grinding firemoss. He nearly relieves himself on a stack of empty boxes before remembering there are no highstorms under this stone roof to wash the place clean. He is not, he tells himself, just some drunkard wallowing in alleys. He is worse than that.
The deeper pain wakes with him — the persistent, ringing need that the moss does not even satisfy any more, only mutes. He stumbles to the well, takes his place behind the women drawing water for the day, and rides the cramps that always come the morning after. Around him, Sadeas's green-jacketed soldiers shove their way past a Kholin man in line and a near-brawl gets swallowed back. Teft looks down into the dark water of the well and thinks, briefly, about throwing himself in. Then a face appears in the reflection over his shoulder: a glowing pale woman with hair that hovers around her head like cloud. *Teft … you've spoken oaths… .* He slaps the surface, tells her to go and find someone who cares, and stumbles off through the market.
He knows what he should do — go back to the barracks, face his crew like a man — and he knows he cannot. Instead he wanders. He ends up at a tent off in among the shuttered taverns — the place need not advertise, because the men who need it always know how to find it, and every warcamp he has ever served in has had a version of it somewhere. A tough Herdazian on the door waves him in. A woman in a fingerless glove brings him a little bowl of firemoss without asking after payment. They know he has nothing on him this morning. They know he will be back.
He hates himself, and grinds the moss anyway. It hurts — he has worn through his calluses — and the pain is a kind of sharp, present truth. The moss eases the rest. Long ago, he remembers, it gave him euphoria; these days it only lets him stand level with where everyone else stands without trying. It washes the dark version of himself out of his head, washes out the memory of turning his own family in as heretics when they had been right all along, washes out the certainty that he has already as good as betrayed the Bridge Four symbol he wears. For a few minutes it lets him put all of that down.
The trouble is that other men can rub a little moss and stand up and go back to their day. Teft does not work that way. Burdens set down, he keeps going. He is on his third bowl, drooling onto the table, when an awful bright light makes him blink — and Kaladin is kneeling beside him, Rock looming behind. The den keeper coolly demands a garnet broam for the three bowls. Rock suggests ripping off pieces of body and paying with those; Kaladin pushes the light over and tells him to pick the old man up.
Rock's big hands are surprisingly gentle as he picks the old man up. Teft is weeping. Kaladin asks, somewhere in the dark, about the missing coat. He sold it, Teft admits — sold his own storming Bridge Four coat — and the shamespren come down around him like falling flower petals. Halfway back to the barracks he scrounges enough dignity to complain about Rock's breath and walk on his own feet, with a hand at each elbow.
They settle him in a private barrack room, wrapped in blankets, with a bowl of Rock's stew he cannot yet eat. He gives them the right noises — the apologies, the promises to tell them next time the need rises, the promises to let them help. They leave him to rest. Storms, but they are better friends than he deserves. They are all growing into something grand, Bridge Four and its flying knights, and Teft just stays on the ground looking up.
Even bracing himself for a return to work the same day, one thought drowns out everything else: there will be no more moss for a stretch now. He is going to have to spend the next few days excruciatingly clean — only half himself, with nothing standing between him and his own self-loathing, the memories, the glances from the rest of the crew. That, more than anything else, terrifies him.