POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan sketches on the deck of the Honor's Path beside Kaladin. The honorspren vessel is faster than Ico's merchantman: mandras are rigged not only at the prow but to wing-like rails at the sides; there are five decks, including a narrow, pillar-supported high deck reserved for crew. After a week locked in the hold she and the others have been let onto the main deck, free to wander so long as they don't climb up onto it. Sylphrena is still imprisoned.
She tips her map to Kaladin. Pattern says there is an honorspren stronghold called Unyielding Fidelity roughly opposite Kharbranth in the Physical Realm, and given the ship's southwest heading they must be bound there. They have crossed the Frostlands via the eastward swing around the Icingway peninsula. Kaladin taps the map: holding their course, they will pass roughly three hundred miles north of Thaylen City. Closer than they have ever been to another Oathgate. They must steal back their Stormlight, jump ship, find their way to land and hike to the gate. Veil surfaces unbidden in Shallan long enough to suggest a mutiny, then drains away again, and Shallan is left frightened by how lightly her own face is sliding off.
She asks the captain for beads. Notum is tall, imperious, glowing a soft blue-white in a sharp old naval uniform that is part of his substance, with a beard sculpted from a shaved chin up his cheeks into his sideburns. He concedes, but warns her against manifesting wantonly on his deck. A mistspren sailor lowers a bucket of beads on a rope; the captain explains that the beads' tie to the world is through the Spiritual Realm and so distance does not matter — but if she drops one, it will drift back toward its physical counterpart. *We had hoped this day would never come,* he murmurs of new Radiants swearing oaths. He released them, he tells her, because *it wasn't honorable* to keep them prisoner; they will be delivered to someone with more authority.
The days fall into a pattern. Shallan sits by the wale with her beads and her sketches, learning to listen to the small desires of fruits and sticks and bits of cloth. Some objects begin to feel as if they could blossom into manifestations under her hand. She wears the skirt Adolin bought her, hoping it makes her feel more like herself. Veil keeps poking through anyway; the pages of her sketchpad fill with versions of herself in each other's clothes, every one of them wrong. She has avoided trying to Soulcast since the day she nearly died in this same ocean; she has avoided it because she failed.
The first mate, an angular-faced honorspren woman named Borea, comes up out of the hold carrying Azure's sheathed Shardblade and walks it to her. Under Azure's direction Borea eases it a half inch from the sheath, gasps at the *tingle,* and pronounces the bond a clean one — *a Shardblade that requires no enslavement.* She accepts Azure's offer and returns the weapon. Kaladin stalks over and is told the rest: Azure has bargained passage and information at Lasting Integrity in exchange. She is not his soldier nor Adolin's subject; she is here only because circumstance trapped her; the man she hunts brought a Shardblade that bleeds black smoke to this world, and Borea thinks it passed through their fortress years ago. *Traitor,* Kaladin mutters, and stalks off — up onto the high deck, where they are not supposed to go.
Adolin comes over and finds Shallan still sitting among her shifting self-portraits. *Shallan will be fine. I'll bring her back in a moment.* He hugs her without saying anything, which turns out to be the right thing to say. She tries to describe what is happening to her — Veil in the white outfit who peeks out unbidden, Radiant who duels, and another someone she has not yet invented; the cracked vase she keeps turning toward the room — and asks which of them he likes most. He cannot answer that yet, but he tells her, quietly, that he killed Torol Sadeas in a corridor of Urithiru and is not, in truth, sorry. He has spent every day since pretending otherwise to her, to his father, to himself. *Good for you,* she says. His father is a great man who is better off not knowing. He pulls her close. *I prefer the real you,* he tells her. *She's the one I'm talking to right now.* Then noise breaks the peace.
Up on the high deck, Kaladin has glassed the horizon, refused to be sent down, and faced Notum himself. The captain offers him the option of being killed to free Sylphrena from a bond he considers inappropriate — too intimate, struck unsupervised, with one too young of mind. Notum explains the lineage: before he died, Honor stopped making honorspren himself and asked the Stormfather — his weak shadow — to do it. The Stormfather made only a handful, all but Sylphrena lost to the Recreance, and only ten more since, Notum descending from one. Sylphrena is *both old and young.* Then pinpricks of light begin to crystallise in the air beside him and spiral into long luminous trails. *Windspren,* Notum tells him, gaping; they live almost wholly on Kaladin's side — Notum has never seen one. Through their bond Syl whispers into Kaladin's mind: she can feel him stronger than usual; he is close to the Fourth Ideal, and he will have to figure it out himself. Kaladin tells Notum of his oath as a Windrunner and of the Bondsmith he is sworn to protect, and Notum is shocked — *which Bondsmith, of the three?* Kaladin only knows it is the Stormfather. He challenges the captain to see beyond the letter of his rules. *I will consider,* Notum says.
Adolin climbs the steps behind Shallan and watches her face change as she sees Kaladin at the prow surrounded by his halo of windspren — her foot settling, her posture squaring, her lips melting into something fond. *I need to draw that,* she says, and stands there staring instead. Adolin climbs up to join Pattern near the rear of the high deck, breathing out slow. *Kind of hard to compete with that.* Then a sailor at the stern lowers her spyglass, raises it again, and begins to call out in spren-tongue. The crew tear themselves away from Kaladin and crowd around her. Notum takes the glass and finally hands it to Kaladin — *you were right, human, when you said you might be followed.* Low on the southern horizon, against the black sky, eight distant specks. The Fused have caught them.