Damnation
POV: kaladin
Summary
Three weeks into Bridge Four, Kaladin sits slumped in a spring rain with Syl on his shoulder, staring at a puddle. Of the twenty-five who survived his first plateau run, only Kaladin and one other are still alive — twenty-three killed across uncounted bridge runs. The crew is set apart in the lumberyard like a contagious disease. Gaz hounds them at logging and chasm runs between assaults; bridgemen who lag are whipped, bridgemen who refuse to charge the Parshendi are beheaded; everything else is fed to the Stormfather's Judgment. Kaladin has stopped learning the bridgemen's names. He thinks of his father's two-kinds-of-people speech — those who take lives, those who save them — and decides there is a third group, large and full, into which he and his crewmates fit: people who exist only to be killed or saved.
Syl, trying to reach him, asks why he no longer fights. Her memories of the man he was are blurring; her instincts, she says, warn her that if she stays in this camp she will lose herself. She tells him she has to leave. He begs her not to. She apologizes, says goodbye, and zips away in the form of a tumble of translucent leaves.
The same hour, Laresh brings a column of fresh recruits down to the bridge yard — smugglers caught with their wagons. Behind them limps a smaller, more ragtag batch meant for Bridge Four; among them is a boy of fourteen, round-faced, with Tien's frightened black eyes. Kaladin almost moves to shelter him. Then he remembers everyone he has ever tried to protect, and turns back to the logs.
The boy dies on the very next bridge run. The other long-surviving bridgeman dies an arrow's-length away. Kaladin stands in the wind and finds the two bodies in a small stone hollow — the older man fallen on a shelf above the boy, blood dripping from an arrow-tip down onto the boy's open eye like a slow red tear. That night a highstorm hammers the Bridge Four barrack. Kaladin curls against the cold stone and, for the first time in a year, weeps.