POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin remembers being kissed. Long before Bridge Four, when he was a squadleader in Amaram's army, Tarah — a fully Alethi darkeyed girl whose father worked under an army quartermaster — had wrapped her arms around his chest from behind one cooling evening. He sat shirtless on a stump, his spear across his lap, Tien's alternating-coloured stone turning in his fingers. She wore a Thaylen-cut dress in an outdated style — apron-front, straps over the shoulders, short skirts — over a bright shirt, and smelled of starched uniforms and new leather; she had handed her last measuring duties to a new girl so she could come find him.
She had teased him about the spear he refused to let her requisition; she had cadged real flour from a recent Kholinar caravan, and wanted him over to bake her father's Thaylen bread. He had organised the evening practice himself and could not skip it.
Then she told him she was transferring — a scribe's post in Mourn's Vault with the local highprince's standing house, a real chance for a darkeyed woman like her, and a way to bring her ageing father along instead of seeing him conscripted off to the Shattered Plains. She kissed him lightly and waited. He half-floated the idea of transferring after her into the standing house guard. They both knew he would not — not with Tien's stone in his pocket and lighteyed highlords getting boys killed in petty quarrels. She squeezed his arm; she hoped that one day he would learn to be present for the people still alive in front of him, instead of only the dead. She left. Two letters of hers reached him; he hired someone to read them out and never wrote back. He had been young and stupid and proud. She had not been wrong.
Two days later he is on the head of a small file moving through Shadesmar with his harpoon over a shoulder. The jungle has thinned to taller, sculptural trees with deep crimson trunks whose branches end in brittle clusters of mineral; lifespren drift among them, and once in a while the bobbing soul of a fish. Syl thinks the forest is wrong — too quiet, no angerspren, no predators. With their Stormlight supply nearly out, they have spent most of the last stretch on foot; the obsidian rolls in deep valleys and sharp hills, and despite the unmoving sun Kaladin has begun to worry they have drifted off course.
Adolin climbs up behind him asking for a rest; Kaladin tells him to wait for the crest. Without Stormlight Shallan is the slowest, Pattern beside her and a wreath of chicken-sized exhaustionspren above; without her memory for maps, however, they would not even know which way Thaylen City lay in this realm. There is no sign of pursuit. He cannot decide whether that is reassuring. Tarah's old instruction rides him — be there for what is alive — and he urges them up the hill. He will not fail again as he failed at Kholinar.
A single windspren bursts alight at his shoulder as he reaches the top. Beyond the rise, the next valley holds a sea of bobbing soul-flames above a vast bead expanse. Thaylen City. The others labour up beside him; Shallan sinks down coughing. Out of the bead lake rise two enormous spren in the same shape as the ones at Kholinar — one sparkling many colours, one shimmering oily black — each holding a building-long spear. They do not look corrupted. Between them stands the Oathgate platform, with a broad white bridge sweeping across the beads to the obsidian shore.
That bridge is held by a host of enemy spren — hundreds at least, perhaps a thousand strong.