To Care
POV: kaladin
Summary
In the bottoms of the chasms on a salvage rotation, with the long shadows of the chasm walls reaching down into the wet cold and the only light the lamps the crew has rigged onto the walls, Kaladin drills Bridge Four in spear stances between rounds of recovering Parshendi and bridgeman salvage. The drills are quiet by necessity — sound carries badly down here, but not so badly that he wants to risk being overheard from above — and the crew has learned to hold them in the long hush between highstorm-falls of new debris.
Moash and Teft work a resetting-stance drill. Teft knocks Moash backward with a controlled push at the chest; Moash scrambles back into stance without thinking, his weight already shifted before his head has caught up. He drinks the drill in two hours flat. Drehy and Skar are nearly as quick on their own pairs. Kaladin, leaning against the chasm wall with a frillbloom opening orange fronds beside his head, watches the four of them and realises something he should have seen weeks ago. He would not normally start reset drills until the second or third day of a fresh spear-recruit's training.
These men — cast off by the army, worked half to death on bridge runs, kept alive on his careful triage of food and his knobweed-bought antiseptics — are the fittest, training-readiest recruits he has ever been given. They have been doing carry-the-bridge drills six days a week for months. They are pre-conditioned in every muscle the spear needs. The army's mistake is the same one Sadeas has been making about them from the beginning. By trying to beat them down, Sadeas himself has prepared them to excel. Kaladin does not say it aloud. He files it away. The plan to break out, when they make it, is going to work better than even he had hoped.