POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin balks when Dalinar orders him onto a horse. The grazing animals in the open enclosure west of the warcamp — pouncing for grass shoots that retreat into their burrows the moment a hoof comes near — look like the wrong shape of beast to trust, and a slave-turned-surgeon-turned-bridgeman has never been on one. Dalinar points out that the run to the palace the night of the king's accident took three-quarters of an hour, and that bodyguards who cannot ride cannot keep up with Adolin and Renarin on a battlefield. Six Bridge Four men shrug their way into agreement; only Moash nods eagerly. As Dalinar walks away, Moash takes Kaladin aside and warns him not to get too close to the highprince, however good a commander he may be — lighteyes are lighteyes — and adds that anyone who has met a charging mounted Shardbearer on the field knows why he wants the skill himself.
The stablemaster is, to Kaladin's surprise, a young lighteyed woman in a riding-slit Vorin dress over trousers — Jenet — who is openly unhappy about handing her horses over to ruffians and lectures them through saddling, bridling, posture, reins, and the rules for not spooking a mount before any of them is allowed near a horse. Adolin rides up on his enormous white mount to flirt and gets a pair of stones thrown at him before he hunches off out of range. Jenet explains that horses were unknown to Vorinism when Arts and Majesty was set down — the Radiants had Ryshadium and even kings had little access to ordinary horses — and so the stables are not bound by the masculine/feminine division of arts. Kaladin draws an aging brown mare named Spray who will rather lick rocks for the grass underneath than walk, and spends the first half of the lesson pulling her head up. Moash forgets the reins and lets his horse wander off.
Once moving, Kaladin guides Spray up alongside Natam and asks what he remembers from the night of the king's accident — any unfamiliar servants, any unrecognised soldiers, anyone on the balcony before the highstorm. Natam gropes for it before his mount carries him off at a trot he is afraid to correct. As Kaladin watches him go, Syl gallops past as a horse made of light, settles on Spray's neck, and listens as he hears himself replay the conversation. He stops on the phrase *before the storm.* A highstorm would have bent or twisted that railing; it did not. The joint was cut clean and the mortar deliberately worked away. The sabotage was done after the storm passed, in a sharply narrower window. Syl grins.
Beaten by Spray's one speed, he cannot catch Natam. Adolin trots up to mock him and points to a leaner half-broken mare staked on a long rope in her own pen — Dreamstorm — claiming she might be more to Kaladin's liking. Kaladin dismounts and walks over, breathing in a small lungful of Stormlight without quite meaning to. He tells Syl he is going to ride Dreamstorm because he is afraid of the things. He throws himself at the saddle on a Stormlight-amplified leap, sticks himself fast by pouring more Light into the seat, and rides the bucking mare back and forth like a limp cloth until she finally stills, blowing froth. He grins at the bridgemen cheering from a safe distance — and then the Light in the saddle gives out and Dreamstorm bucks him into the ground. He lies on his back staring at the sky with painspren clawing up out of the stone around him, gets the muddy snort of an unfathomable equine eye in his face, and finds himself laughing.
Dalinar arrives in time to drily remind him that training with weapons usually starts with the edges removed. He approves the daily riding schedule, accepts Kaladin's proposed patrols outside the warcamps in two weeks (with enough men to guard the horses, and *leave that one behind*), and walks off to meet a visitor on the next ridge. Adolin, grudging, thanks Kaladin for not telling his father he put him up to the Dreamstorm stunt; Kaladin tells him he is not an idiot and could see the trap. Posting on Spray now with the worst of the bouncing out of him, he rides back to Natam and asks a different question — anyone on the balcony after the storm. Natam says only guards. He stayed on the door himself; the one who went out alone for a while, lingering past the end of his shift to see the king settled, was Moash. Kaladin notes the coincidence and forces the thought down — Moash has no Shardblade, and the suspicion is ridiculous on its face. Turning his horse away, he sees the man Dalinar has gone to meet on the ridge: Brightlord Amaram, laughing with Adolin and Renarin riding up to him. The choking, sudden anger that rises in him surprises him — he had thought it buried deeper than that. He turns Spray pointedly the other way, looking forward, very much, to riding out of the warcamps in two weeks' time.