POV: kaladin
Summary
The storm does not belong to Kaladin. He claims the skies and to a degree the winds, but a highstorm is a country in which he is a visiting dignitary — granted respect, granted no real authority. Hunting the assassin in white he once flew at the very front of the stormwall like a leaf in a wave; with passengers, that method is far too risky. He and Shallan worked out on the Thaylen trip that he can still draw on the storm's power while flying *above* the clouds, provided he stays within a hundred feet or so of them. He soars there now, with Skar and Drehy under formation as a safety net and Elhokar's strike team in tow.
There are six passengers, making nine of them in total. Elhokar heads the column in thick clothing and a glass-fronted naval wind mask, Adolin behind him bundled the same way, then two of Shallan's sloppy deserters and her maidservant — Kaladin does not understand why the king insisted on those three. Shallan, conspicuously, flies in only her pinned blue havah and white leggings, Stormlight surging from her skin to keep her warm, hair streaming auburn behind her and freehand out into the wind, waving at passing windspren and forcing Kaladin to keep nudging her speed to stay in line. He cannot help thinking she would be a natural at really flying — using the body to dance in the air — and snaps himself out of the daydream.
He tucks his arms against himself and runs the line of passengers, renewing each Lashing in turn. Syl uncoils up to him as a ribbon of light: *we just passed the Windrunner River*, which means Kholinar is close. She tells him Shallan is a natural; he sighs and refuses to look at her. *You need to be with people to be happy, Kaladin,* she says. He growls back that he has Bridge Four; she retorts in the shape of a tiny young woman in a girlish dress that she sees him stealing looks. He cancels Shallan's argument by telling Syl to fetch Skar and Drehy for the stop.
He brings each of them down to a half-Lashing-upward weightlessness — none of Sigzil's tidy numbers quite capture what he is doing; a basic Lashing makes the body *forget* gravity rather than adding to it, partial Lashings just leave some fraction of weight pulled downward, and on top of all that he has somehow shaped a kind of channel around the group, like a current in a river, that keeps them moving together. Shallan gazes at the boiling storm beneath them — *like mixing paint, if dark paint could spawn new colors and light within its swirls* — and worries about losing a shoe down into it; Adolin reports that he lost his lunch back there somewhere. She offers, characteristically, a defense of bad art (*you learn more from bad pieces than good*) and adds that she invokes it only to justify the creation of *Captain Kaladin*. He squints eastward instead of answering: the storm is dying behind them.
He drops alone through the clouds — dirty fog from inside, rain growing weak, thunder soft — to scout. The killing field before Kholinar is empty, as expected. The question is who holds the walls: humans or Voidbringers. He descends cautiously and is rewarded with the sight of Alethi flags raised over the guard posts as soon as the storm has passed; Kholinar has *not* fallen, even with all surrounding towns reportedly occupied. Out on the killing field the enemy has begun laying brick-and-mortar foundations for storm-bunkers from which they plainly intend to interdict resupply. Between storms, large parshman forces would be camped here building them up; for now the field is bare. He lets himself, finally, look at the city.
It is beautiful. He has flown over Kholinar before — once in a half-dream in which he met the Stormfather — but the city has never struck him the way it does now from below the rain. He has seen proper cities; the warcamps together are larger than this one. What stops him is the variety: stone buildings of different shapes and rooftypes, not the bunkers he grew up beside. Its signature is the windblades — large curving fins of stone that rise from the ground like the back of some half-buried creature, glittering red and white and orange under the rain — and the outer walls partially built on top of the outermost of them. Towering above the city to the north stands the palace, a complex of bright columns and rotundas and turrets like a little city of its own.
And something is very, very wrong with it. A cloud hangs over the palace that at first looks like a trick of the light; the wrongness only sharpens as he stares, strongest over a flat raised plaza at the east of the complex — the palace monastery, the Oathgate platform's home. He narrows his eyes and Lashes himself back up through the clouds, ashamed to have gaped that long. *Did you see that darkness?* he asks Syl. *Yeah,* she whispers. *Something's very wrong.* He surfaces to find the group has drifted west on the breeze and his Stormlight is no longer renewing — the storm is past. Elhokar wants to drop in front of the city and march to the Oathgate in plain sight, since the Alethi flags say Kholinar still holds. *My wife and child are inside,* he reminds them. Kaladin presses caution; Adolin backs him — *the bridgeman isn't the jumpy type*; the king relents and asks Shallan for a recommendation. *Land far enough out that the Stormlight doesn't give us away,* she says. *We can walk in under illusion.* Elhokar nods. *Do as she suggests, Captain.*