Of Alds and Milp
POV: kaladin
Summary
Five and a half years before in Hearthstone, a pack of whitespines takes Brightlord Roshone's autumn hunting party in the woods west of the village, and the survivors come back down the road in pieces. Laral shrieks past Kal into the surgery as the wounded are carried in on cloaks dripping blood. Inside, Lirin works frantically over Roshone himself — a whitespine spine-needle has gone through the abdomen and one of the great vessels — while the citylord's son Rillir bleeds out steadily on the next table. There is only one surgeon. Lirin chooses the father over the son and saves him. He sends two strong men back up the road into the woods to recover Alds and Milp, the two townsmen the highprinces' guards had on the hunt with them; neither is expected to survive the carry.
Outside on the surgery step afterwards, in the slowly fading light, Lirin sits down hard and tells Kaladin — for once not as a teacher but as a tired man speaking to a son — that they must be better than Roshone is. That even his own strengthening of resolve when he saw his enemy on the table is something he would not let his son inherit, and a thing he is ashamed of in himself. A surgeon makes no distinction by whose blood is in his hands. That is the whole craft.
Kaladin does not answer. He has just realised something, watching the operation through the doorway, that he cannot say out loud and may never say out loud. He himself, given the table to manage, would have let Roshone die. He might even have flicked the knife a wrong way to hasten it, and called it accident afterwards in his own head, and gone to bed. Lirin once laughed gently at the idea of his gentle son going for a spearman: *you can hardly step on a cremling without feeling guilty.* For the first time, sitting on the step beside his father in the dimming light, Kaladin understands clearly that his father is wrong about him. Some people, like a festering finger or a leg shattered beyond repair, simply need to be removed.