POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin has never been in a proper prison before — only cages, pits, pens, rooms under guard. Dalinar's camp gaol is unfairly nice: two blankets, a pillow, a chamber pot regularly emptied, food better than he ever ate as a slave. The stone shelf is not the worst bed. And he hates it. Without windows, the walls press; he sweats; he is restless. The solitude does not bother him. The enclosure does. He has only ever been shut in this small for a highstorm.
On the third day a distant disturbance somewhere inside the prison gets him on his feet at the bars. He eyes one of the spheres set in the wall just out of reach — close enough, perhaps, to draw the Light through the bars — and asks Syl whether she would help him break out if it came to it. She is no highspren, she answers; laws do not matter to her, only what is right. But why would he go, when he came willingly? He came thinking they would let him out, he answers; he will not let them execute him. She tells him Dalinar said he would not. He spits that Dalinar let it happen. She makes him say it again. He cannot. Fine — but Elhokar is a child of a king. Moash and his friends are right; the kingdom would be better off without him. Syl drops to the floor with her head bowed.
The servant brings food without speaking — steamed vegetables under a salty black sauce, finger food only, no fork or knife — and he goes back to his bench.
*Nice place you have here, bridgeboy,* Wit says.
Wit is sitting on a bench outside the bars, under the spheres, tuning a strange stringed instrument across his lap. The bench may not have been there a moment ago. Wit is in black-on-black; his thin silver sword and a brown sack sit beside him. The guards, he allows, "technically" let him in. He has come, he says, for a story. Kaladin tells him a man went to jail; he hated it; the end. *So it's a story about a child, then,* says Wit. He offers to start Kaladin off with a better one — a bunny and a chick, which neither of them know — and amends it to a piece of wet slime and a many-legged crab on a rainy day.
Then he slaps the strings, and what comes out is not what a single instrument should be able to do. Two melodies at once, a frenzied repetition under a soaring line, the room shaking with it. *Close your eyes, idiot,* Wit says. *What do you see?* Kaladin sees a man running. Wit sings the tale of Fleet, a runner who began at the eastern sea, a legend of folk-tale said once to have outrun the Herald Chana-rach herself — and who at last, with the brashness of fools, set out to race a highstorm itself across the world. Kaladin tells the rest. Fleet runs across Alethkar; up into mountains where the storm chews his heels; down into Azir's plains in the sun; up again into the Misted Mountains; down into Shinovar where the storm itself begins to weaken in a land that is not its own. The storm catches up. Fleet falls within sight of the western sea.
The music stops. *He died,* Kaladin says. The end. Wit only smiles. Then he attacks the strings again — and sings how the storm, finding Fleet fallen, halted of its own accord on the soil and could not move further forward; how his soul finishes the race on the winds. He stands at the doorway when it is over, instrument under his arm. *What does it mean?* Kaladin whispers. It is your story, says Wit. You decide. *The storm caught him,* Kaladin tries. The storm, says Wit, catches everyone — eventually. Does it matter? He tips his sword in salute to his forehead and goes.