Stormblessed
POV: cenn
Summary
Five years after the murder of King Gavilar, the fifteen-year-old recruit Cenn stands in the front rank of Brightlord Amaram's army at a minor border skirmish. He is openly terrified, sure he is about to die, with only three months of training under his belt. The bearded veteran beside him, Dallet, steadies him with practical advice — relieve yourself before the charge, stay with the squad, do not raise your shield.
Dallet introduces him to their squadleader, the young Kaladin Stormblessed, who paid to have Cenn pulled out of an incompetent officer's command and into his own. Dallet explains that Kaladin's squad keeps the fewest casualties of any in the army; the men in front who think to raise shields against arrows die slower than the men who run, because the lighteyed commanders fire their volleys to fall where men are thickest.
The horns sound and the lines break. Kaladin's squad sprints ahead of the chaotic charge and stops on a small hill he and Dallet had scouted from the line, forming a tight V around Cenn. Enemy spearmen come at them in disorganized clusters and break against the formation; Kaladin signals shape changes with his spear against his shield, the squad pivoting from V to ring as the field churns around them.
When Amaram's line bulges back, Cenn is separated from his comrades in the press, panics, and runs into an unfamiliar squad that scatters at the first charge. An enemy spearman drives a spear into his thigh and stands over him to finish him; before the killing blow lands, Kaladin appears alone, drops the first attacker, and cuts down five more in seconds with spear and thrown knife. He kneels and binds Cenn's leg with the ease of someone who has done it many times.
Kaladin then takes two subsquads in a pincer pattern across the field at a mounted enemy lighteyes — one of Hallaw's battalionlords, possibly "the one" Kaladin is hunting. He kills the officer with a thrown knife to the eye, hoping the kill will earn his men a transfer to the Shattered Plains, where the king's real war is fought. As Cenn fades from blood loss beside a red-ribboned banner calling for runners, a single rider on a black horse charges toward them in gilded Shardplate, carrying a curved, ridged six-foot Shardblade — Dallet had said there would be no Shardbearer on this field. To Cenn it looks like the Almighty himself walking the battlefield. He closes his eyes.