POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin remembers, of all things, scraping crem from a barracks floor in Amaram's army. He kneels on kneepads with a chisel, using the long even strokes his mother taught him — slide under the crem and lift, easier than chipping from above. Soldiers, he is discovering, spend most of their time walking places, waiting at the wrong places, or getting yelled at for either. He wonders why he isn't sharpening or oiling something instead.
A shadow falls over the door and Sergeant Tukks settles onto a bunk to watch him work. Tukks is younger than the other sergeants, with off, sunken features, and is famously fond of fathom bark. He tells Kal this isn't really a punishment; it's because everyone in the squad was waiting for him to get a dressing-down, and the longer it took the more the new recruit was going to feel like the odd man out. Officially he's scraping for talking back to a lighteyed officer. Unofficially he's being helped to fit in.
Tukks mentions, casually, that he has found Tien — assigned to the Seventh, working as a messenger. Kal's breath catches. The brothers were not supposed to be split. He asks for a transfer; Tukks offers to try to get the boy moved to train with him instead. The image of Tien — who carries cremlings outside and talks to them like pets — holding a spear is ludicrous, and Kal grips the chisel hard to stop himself walking out.
Tukks asks the real question. Kal froze on the practice field today. Did he want to talk about it? Tukks assumes it was fear — everyone freezes, that's why they practise, so a man can lock up here instead of in a fight that would kill him. Kal says quietly that he wasn't afraid of getting hurt. Tukks corrects him gently. *You won't get far if you can't admit to a little fear.* Kal says it again: he was afraid of *making* someone hurt. Tukks chews his bark and concedes that's a different problem.
Kal finally asks how Tukks does it — how a man can hurt other poor darkeyed slobs like himself. Tukks doesn't think about the enemy. He thinks about his mates: his squad is his family now, and he will not let them down. The world doesn't make sense to Kal — his father the surgeon told him to keep emotional distance from patients; here a career killer is telling him to *care*. Tukks rests a hand on his shoulder, tells him to focus on his squadmates and be the man they need, and predicts the squad will be friendlier at dinner. They are. Kal never tells Tukks the truth about why he froze: in that moment he had realised, with absolute clarity, that he could kill if he needed to. That was what had terrified him.
The memory ends and Kaladin is sitting on a chunk of obsidian on the bank of the bead-sea of Shadesmar. The distant sun has not moved since they arrived. A fearspren crawls along the bank — eel-shaped, axehound-sized, purple antennae waving — sniffs at him, finds nothing it wants, and moves on. A flock of gloryspren passes overhead, their bodies bulbous and long-tailed, golden ball where the head should be; he realises that what he sees of these spren on his side is only a piece of their full forms.
Syl sits down beside him, lays her head on his arm, and confirms the others are still asleep with Pattern watching them — *strange,* she says, because Pattern is nice. She muses on the cognitive side: spren do not sleep or eat, they may live on human emotion and being thought about, and in Shadesmar they think for themselves while in the physical world they need a bond or they go as mindless as the gloryspren. She made the transfer because she knew Kaladin would call for her one day, choosing to trust that the honor of men still lived — what her father the Stormfather always denied.
Kaladin asks whether she could transfer back, to warn Dalinar that something is wrong with the Oathgates. She can't; her bond is to him and he is here. She pokes him — this is all a distraction from the real problem. He agrees he needs a weapon and food, and starts asking about obsidian for a spearhead. She lifts her head and looks at him with worried eyes: he was basically catatonic when the Oathgate spren turned on them. He insists he is fine. She wraps her arms around his right arm like a child clinging to a favourite toy and tells him *something's wrong inside you, and I don't know what.*
He tells her he was just surprised to see Sah there, not to mention Moash. He does not tell her about the cold thing waking inside him — or that the question on his mind is the one Tukks taught him not to ask. *How do you do it? How can you hurt people, Tukks?* She closes her eyes and leans against him without letting go. When the others stir, he gets up and goes to join them.