POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin catches Shallan's hand. Boulders crash on the plateau above. Water swells in the chasm. He shoves with his ruined leg, she heaves with a strength that does not look like hers, and he gets the rest of the way into the alcove she carved. The hollow faces west and is barely three feet deep; the worst of the storm breaks against the plateau itself. They huddle together against the back wall. Lightning shows the Plains' flood ripping past the opening, fifty feet up in moments, dirty with branches and ripped-out vines and the bobbing corpses of men and Parshendi from the latest fighting. A surge of water lifts them off the rock; the current tries to suck them out; the chasm wall holds and they settle back.
The wind goes strange. A light too steady to be lightning moves over the plateau above — through the sheeting water that falls past their alcove, Kaladin swears he sees an enormous glowing figure walking through the storm, then a second behind it, alien and sleek, leg after leg. Striding the storm.
Shallan asks him to tell her something — anything — so that the sound is not just the storm. He does. He tells her about Amaram and the men he had got killed for trusting him, about Tvlakv the slaver, about the long numb season where he could not be bothered to kill himself. He tells her about Bridge Four. He does not tell her about Syl, because that is too much. He gets all the way through to the last bridge run and the rescue of Dalinar. She does not interrupt with a single question.
*I killed my father*, she whispers back, when he is done. And, into his chest, she tells him. The violent man she loved. The murders. The night during a different storm when she poisoned him, then strangled him while he watched her, unable to move. She tells him about her family. She names where Helaran died — Alethkar, at Amaram's hand — with anger in her voice. He freezes. He never mentions, when he tells the Amaram story, that he himself was the spearman who killed that Shardbearer; he learned a long time ago to leave that out. She has not connected it. He does not correct her.
She goes on. After the killing of her father they decided she would find Jasnah, because Jasnah had a working Soulcaster like the broken one their father had carried. Not, she admits dryly, to ask Jasnah to fix theirs — that would have been rational. The plan, stupid and naive, was to switch the two and bring a working fabrial back for the family. Jasnah caught her, was intrigued, made her a ward and arranged the Adolin match to protect the family while she trained. *Generous*, Kaladin says, *for a woman you intended to rob.*
She is mid-sentence about why she thinks Jasnah did it when she goes silent.
Kaladin blinks. She is gone. The water has stopped moving. His leg no longer hurts. The alcove is somehow tall enough for him to stand in. He steps to the lip and finds himself looking up into a face as wide as eternity, stars upon stars filling it. He recognises it from before — *the Stormfather*. The wind has stopped. He can hear his own heart.
The Stormfather addresses him in titles tied to Honor and to Tanavast, and this time speaks aloud, not in a dream. The voice is the shaking of the plateau and of his own body. He asks the question he has been bracing himself against: Syl. What has he done to her? The answer comes back as a judgment — he has killed her. He protests. The Stormfather says it has happened once before — men cannot be trusted with such bonds — and names her his own beloved, taken from him by Kaladin's hand. He begs to know how to fix it. He calls Kaladin akin to the human bond-killers of a prior age — those who once destroyed so many he loved. He pronounces him cut off from the winds and bids him farewell. He names Kaladin's beloved spren broken at his hand, beyond fixing; it has happened as it once happened before.
The storm comes back. He collapses against the rock as his leg and the cold rush back in. Shallan is asking what that was. She saw the face too — saw stars in it. He names it for her: the Stormfather. She wants to draw it. He tells her good luck in this rain.
They settle in to wait it out. He does not tell her what the face said. He tries, idly, once more, to pull Stormlight from a sphere — partly to see her reaction. Nothing comes. Outside, the floodwater carries a permanent bulge in midstream over the chasmfiend's wedged carcass. The rain slackens; the river reverses as the storm-rains shift west of the Plains; the chasm drains back the way it came. The carcass surfaces.
He shifts to climb down and finds Shallan asleep against him, snoring softly. He decides she may be the only person ever to fall asleep outside in a highstorm. Drained, sick with what he has been told about Syl, he lets himself follow her down.