POV: navani
Summary
Navani Kholin leans out over the side of her flying platform and looks down hundreds of feet at the green-veined fertility of Alethkar — the country of her childhood, made almost foreign by her long absences in colder places. Velat the cartographer, tied to the deck with sensible rope, begs her to lean less; Dalinar declines to overrule her on her own ship; Navani grins into the wind and leans further. *Fifty years of life, and somehow more impetuous, not less.* She gives the order to descend.
The Fourth Bridge is a hundred feet long, sixty wide, forty thick — three decks, a sheltered command pavilion at the rear, an exposed front for delicate work, and the old Bridge Four bridge embedded flush in the deck as a symbol. Pairs of conjoined gemstones bind her to a lattice of pulleys and chull teams at Urithiru: one pair for altitude, another for horizontal motion, with aluminium plates to isolate force along a plane so that chulls can be turned around and the ship keep moving forward. She herself, Navani reflects, is mostly a person who guides people smarter than she is. She still grins like a child while it works. She had named the ship for the chasm bridges that once saved Dalinar and Adolin, in the hope it would save many others. She wishes Elhokar were aboard to see it.
Down on the field, a dozen Edgedancers glide off the lower deck on alternating feet, gathering the townspeople of Hearthstone; one growing girl in the rear trips over a stone the others dodged. Navani hides her smile. While the Windrunners watch the sky, she crosses the deck to Kmakl — Fen's aging admiral husband, here as a personal favour — and apologises for her *odd ship*. Five knots on average, he tells her, is impressive for a flying barge that already brings troops in fresh and provides its own high ground for archers. He looks past her at the horizon and confesses he is watching the end of an era. *If these things become ubiquitous, my dear, it won't only be navies that are obsolete.* He cannot decide whether he envies or pities the young lads who will inherit it.
He sends her on with a soft pat: the Bondsmith wants her. She joins Dalinar at the front of the deck, where Highmarshal Kaladin arrives with his father in tow. Dalinar greets him as *Lirin Stormblessed* — the house name Kaladin never told him he had been given — and offers the surgeon a quiet welcome. Lirin proposes mobile field hospitals on ships like this one; Dalinar points out Edgedancers already do that work, and sends him below to inspect the holds. Kaladin hangs back to apologise — *He doesn't deal well with surprises* — and reports the new Fused he encountered. The fog will not cover them as much as they had hoped. Dalinar presses his palm to Kaladin's chest and renews his Stormlight from the perpendicularity he opens between realms; Navani feels the air warp around them and writes down what she perceives — a moment of glass-bead Shadesmar, a tone in the distance. She has been keeping notes on her husband's powers; he reads them over her shoulder; she wishes she had a clearer question to ask.
What she has, instead, is a hypothesis that frightens her. The tower grows things at an altitude where nothing should grow, and it should not be intelligible without a heart. At its centre stands a crystal pillar — a fabrial unlike any she has ever seen, almost certainly meant to power the place — and a powerful spren on the order of the Stormfather, whom surviving spren simply call *the Sibling*, is said once to have lived there. By their accounts the Sibling was lost to the Recreance and is now *slumbering*, whatever that means; the pillar will not take Stormlight when Dalinar tries to infuse it. She watches him and his Stormfather in the hope they will give her a clue she is missing.
A flat Herdazian voice from behind her: *So the Alethi really have learned to fly.* She turns to find the Mink standing at her engineer station with one of Velat's maps in his hands and another already palmed; Dalinar has spun, hand on sword, but the man's face is jovial. *Your flying boy says you've got a place for me. Don't know what I think of serving an Alethi.* He eyes the Blackthorn in particular: he has spent most of his life avoiding men like him. Dalinar meets the dig with sober respect; what remains of the Herdazian army, the Mink tells him, is in four hollows between here and Herdaz — perhaps a few hundred men — and if Dalinar's ship can fetch them, they will talk. Dalinar agrees on the spot. Navani notes — privately, the way she has learned to — that it remains her ship and he has just dispatched it without asking. He does that. She does not love it.
The first refugees start coming up from below under the Edgedancers' care, and Navani turns to the seating plan she has already drawn — until Lyn drops onto the deck with the report. Three full flights of Heavenly Ones are coming. Kaladin was right. They will try to drive them off; her fear is that they will not be able to, and that this new airship will be harried all the way back to the Plains by enemies in the air.