POV: shallan
Summary
The sun is a smouldering ember on the horizon as Shallan's little caravan rolls within sight of the column of smoke ahead, now resolving into three separate fires twisting into one. They stop the wagons short of cresting the last hill. Bluth climbs forward with his too-fine hat in hand, scouts the bowl below, and waves Shallan and Tvlakv up: three caravan wagons smoulder in the grass, arrows and a pile of corpses scattered across the ground, and a cluster of exhausted-but-living guards and parshmen move among five more wagons that are scorched but intact. They have just survived one attack. Tvlakv is for slipping past — let the deserters fall on the richer prize — until Shallan borrows his cracked spyglass and confirms that the band trailing them are thirty-odd well-equipped soldiers with their insignia scoured off.
A lighteyed scout in a tan coat over trousers rises out of the shadows nearby with her foreign companion Yix, a golden-haired swordsman who never seems to be where the eye expects. The scout glances through her own glass, swears that the men behind are deserters, and tells Shallan flatly there is no time to talk — they have two bandit groups to fight. Shallan offers her formal protection in exchange for passage on to the Shattered Plains; the woman laughs that she is gutsy and welcomes her to die with the rest of them, then breaks for the wagons as a second flight of arrows falls and the screaming starts.
Standing in the cold, Shallan feels a familiar chill settle over her — the coldness of clarity, the way the lines of a drawing suddenly resolve into a whole picture. She tells Tvlakv to take Tag down and help; he protests, then meets her eyes glowing faintly in the dusk and obeys. She orders Bluth to turn the wagon around — south, into the deserters — and they rattle down one slope and up the next until they roll over the hilltop straight into the deserters' torchlit line.
She stands up on the seat. There will be an officer here; these were soldiers once. Bless the Stormfather they are here, she cries — bandits are slaughtering her friends two hills over, she has been telling people all day there were soldiers in this direction and nobody believed her. As she speaks she draws on her Stormlight and lays an idealised version of herself over her body — the woman the deserters see in the mirror polish of their breastplates is taller, statelier, with flowing red hair, a gold-embroidered gown, a necklace she does not own, and manicured nails where the actual chipped ones lift toward their leader. The leader Vathah — tall, bearded, arms too long for his body, a Vorin name — answers that they are not what she thinks. *You aren't what you think yourselves to be,* she answers, and asks what he would give to be a soldier again, to rescue instead of rob. He gives the order to take her captive — *Gaz, take this one* — and finds his men are not moving.
The screams from the caravan carry uncannily well. One short man with an eye patch admits he would not mind starting over. A balding older soldier, easily in his forties, remembers having once saved a woman's life — toasts in a tavern, warmth, weeks of feeling like a hero — and tells his comrades they are dying out here for nothing. From the back: *And what have we done with our freedom, Vathah?* The eye-patched man jogs up the hill; the others break and follow, and Bluth of all people whoops and runs after them with his cudgel. Only Vathah and two others remain. He stares at her a long moment, sighs, calls the rest of his men idiots, and marches off too to keep the fools alive.
Left alone in the dark beside her wagon, Shallan sags. No glow comes when she breathes out — she has spent every breath of Light she had. Small exhaustionspren swirl up like spinning dust. Her sliced feet barely hurt at all now. She climbs back into the seat under the violet disc of Salas, opens her sketchbook, and by what little starlight remains draws a glyph-prayer of hope while the fighting goes on out of sight. Pattern hums beside her: *they listened, you changed them.* When she says she did not believe it would work, he tells her she is lies and truth, that she has been talking only of the Surge of light — Lightweaving — but she has another, the Surge of transformation, the same one Soulcasters use. She did not Soulcast the deserters; and yet, somehow, she transformed them. Holding the unburned prayer to her breast, she notices that a page has been torn from her notebook by hands not her own.