POV: kaladin
Summary
On the ninth day of the pilgrimage Kaladin rises early and cooks breakfast. The long orange root vegetables they bought at a village a few days back — *carrots,* Szeth tells him — strike him as faintly unsanitary because they grow down into actual soil rather than into honest cracks in stone, but he washes them three times anyway and they turn out sweet and crunchy raw. Cut, fried in his travel skillet, sweetened with a pinch of sugar, they end up tasting like a breakfast his mother used to make. Rock, he admits to himself, really has made a bit of a cook of him. He sets a plate aside for Szeth, who is meditating, and settles on a roadside stone to eat his own.
Syl drifts down beside him at full size, knees in her hands, hair adrift as if she were underwater. *I don't like this,* she says — meaning Nale going on ahead to *prepare things* at the next monastery. *He's a creep.* She calls the carrots *toes.* Kaladin plays the flute a while when he is done eating, and as so often the music brings the Wind to the camp. He asks her what to expect: Nale obviously waiting at the Skybreaker monastery, with his Honorblade, and the long history of underhanded attempts on Szeth suggests this one will be the worst.
*Don't speak of him like that,* a quiet voice asks. *He might once have been the hero you showed me,* Kaladin tells her, *but in my time he has been a source of only misery, death, and frustration.* *He's just weathered,* the Wind whispers. *Like that rock you sit upon.* She tells Kaladin and Syl to press their hands to the stone, and that she will try.
They do. A flash, an impression. Kaladin cannot hear the stone's voice the way the stonewalkers could, but he sees what it had been: a fine statue of a woman, arms outspread above a road that was here once, candles lit at her feet to make a welcoming place for travellers. Then storms in a rush, year after year, until her features melt and her shape sinks, and what is left under him is a smooth round lump of rock three feet across. *I love the Stones,* the Wind says, *they are my sibling — but my touch breaks them, ever so slowly. Nale is one of these stones, Kaladin, Sylphrena. Time has weathered him away. But like this stone, a part of him remembers what he once was.*
*The only time I have given him pause,* Kaladin says, *was yesterday, when I asked him why he became a Herald.* *Make him remember,* the Wind says. She names the flaws of the nine she knew well — Jezrien proud, Ishar superior, Pralla in love with her secrets, Battar conniving, Chana always sliding out from under responsibility, Nale never able to put a grudge down — and insists they were good people who tried, very hard, and that a piece of an infinite god is still infinite. *Try to see their potential, not their faults.* *I'll try,* Syl sighs. *Hard to feel it.* *It is hard for Nale to feel that way about himself too,* the Wind whispers. *Please. Help him.* Kaladin protests that he has his hands full with one patient already. *But that,* the Wind says, *is why I brought you here.* And then — almost in passing, almost gone before he catches it — she tells him he has already helped *one who will soon be a Herald.* Szeth returns from his meditations, eats a carrot, and they walk on, spren streaming overhead like a highway of light.
On the Shattered Plains the rain falls in a chilling, persistent drizzle that obscures the plateaus, ruins bowstrings, and slicks every surface to mirror. Sigzil sweeps along the back of his ranks above a wall that has been thickened by Stonewards to resist a rain of stones — though that thickness is now wide enough for Deepest Ones to vanish into and attack the Stonewards from the back. The barrage will eat their Stormlight in hours; the enemy has all the Voidlight they want, and he still has no working application of his plan.
A pair of Magnified Ones heave themselves over the wall top supported by Husked Ones dropping in as ribbons of light. Sigzil forms his spear and goes for the largest, but the Magnified One grows a column of carapace around the strike at a furious rate in the storm, trapping the spear and never quite letting him touch anything vital. He dismisses it before it takes his hands, ducks the club-hand, drives a fresh spear through the back of a Husked One's head while the Stormwall finally arrives to distract the rest. As that Fused tumbles into the rain, he sees a hopeful flash of light on the next plateau over and lifts for it.
Two Husked Ones intercept him. One pins his arms; the other grabs his uniform and hisses into his face: *we were promised the chance to fight your leader — the one who killed Lezian. Why does the Stormblessed not come to meet our challenge?* And: *if I kill you, will Stormblessed chase me down for vengeance?* *You can't kill me,* Sigzil grunts. *Too strong?* *No,* he says. *But I've heard the name of my killer screamed on the lips of a dying man. And it's not you.* He kicks the Fused off; the other releases him with a curse as a fresh storm of light hits the wall — Lopen arriving by Oathgate at the head of the Windrunners back from Herdaz with the Mink. Twenty more Radiants. The Skybreakers are driven off; the last Magnified One dies on the wall.
She has cost them tens of dead and a Stoneward killed; the stones keep crashing in. *You brought Stormlight?* Sigzil asks. *Not much,* Lopen answers — they nearly ran themselves out flying Dalinar's force, and the tower had nothing for them on their return; half the Windrunners had to be left behind. *Both Bondsmiths are on a trip into the Spiritual Realm,* Sigzil tells him quietly. Natam hovers over with condolences for Leyten. Sigzil sends them down to support Skar and Peet on the wall and turns toward his command post to give the retreat order — Vienta confirms they cannot spare any more Stormlight without losing the ability to evacuate through the Oathgate entirely.
He is met at the command post by Ka with a whispered message. One of the enemy has made contact with an offer. The defector — the friend of Rlain — Venli. Her offer of troops, on its own, cannot turn the battle. But slotted into the half-built plan Sigzil has been carrying all morning, it clicks. This is the piece he was missing.