Words of Radiance

She almost started laughing as she realized the direction her thoughts were going. She’d nearly drowned, Jasnah was dead, the crew of the Wind’s Pleasure likely murdered or swallowed by the sea! Instead of mourning them or marveling at her survival, Shallan was engaging in scholarly speculation?

That’s what you do, a deeply buried part of herself accused her. You distract yourself. You refuse to think about things that bother you.

But that was how she survived.

Shallan wrapped her arms around herself for warmth on her stone perch and stared out over the ocean. She had to face the truth. Jasnah was dead.

Jasnah was dead.

Shallan felt like weeping. A woman so brilliant, so amazing, was just . . . gone. Jasnah had been trying to save everyone, protect the world itself. And they’d killed her for it. The suddenness of what had happened left Shallan stunned, and so she sat there, shivering and cold and just staring out at the ocean. Her mind felt as numb as her feet.

Shelter. She’d need shelter . . . something. Thoughts of the sailors, of Jasnah’s research, those were of less immediate concern. Shallan was stranded on a stretch of coast that was almost completely uninhabited, in lands that froze at night. As she’d been sitting, the tide had slowly withdrawn, and the gap between herself and the shore was not nearly as wide as it had been. That was fortunate, as she couldn’t really swim.

She forced herself to move, though lifting her limbs was like trying to budge fallen tree trunks. She gritted her teeth and slipped into the water. She could still feel its biting cold. Not completely numb, then.

“Shallan?” Pattern asked.

“We can’t sit out here forever,” Shallan said, clinging to the rock and getting all the way down into the water. Her feet brushed rock beneath, and so she dared let go, half swimming in a splashing mess as she made her way toward the land.

She probably swallowed half the water in the bay as she fought through the frigid waves until she finally was able to walk. Dress and hair streaming, she coughed and stumbled up onto the sandy shore, then fell to her knees. The ground here was strewn with seaweed of a dozen different varieties that writhed beneath her feet, pulling away, slimy and slippery. Cremlings and larger crabs scuttled in every direction, some nearby making clicking sounds at her, as if to ward her off.

She dully thought it a testament to her exhaustion that she hadn’t even considered—before leaving the rock—the sea predators she’d read about: a dozen different kinds of large crustaceans that were happy to have a leg to snip free and chew on. Fearspren suddenly began to wiggle out of the sand, purple and sluglike.

That was silly. Now she was frightened? After her swim? The spren soon vanished.

Shallan glanced back at her rock perch. The santhid probably hadn’t been able to deposit her any closer, as the water grew too shallow. Stormfather. She was lucky to be alive.

Despite her mounting anxiety, Shallan knelt down and traced a glyphward into the sand in prayer. She didn’t have a means of burning it. For now, she had to assume the Almighty would accept this. She bowed her head and sat reverently for ten heartbeats.

Then she stood and, hope against hope, began to search for other survivors. This stretch of coast was pocketed with numerous beaches and inlets. She put off seeking shelter, instead walking for a long time down the shoreline. The beach was composed of sand that was coarser than she’d expected. It certainly didn’t match the idyllic stories she’d read, and it ground unpleasantly against her toes as she walked. Alongside her, it rose in a moving shape as Pattern kept pace with her, humming anxiously.

Shallan passed branches, even bits of wood that might have belonged to ships. She saw no people and found no footprints. As the day grew long, she gave up, sitting down on a weathered stone. She hadn’t noticed that her feet were sliced and reddened from walking on the rocks. Her hair was a complete mess. Her safepouch had a few spheres in it, but none were infused. They’d be of no use unless she found civilization.

Firewood, she thought. She’d gather that and build a fire. In the night, that might signal other survivors.

Or it might signal pirates, bandits, or the shipboard assassins, if they had survived.

Shallan grimaced. What was she going to do?

Build a small fire to keep warm, she decided. Shield it, then watch the night for other fires. If you see one, try to inspect it without getting too close.

A fine plan, except for the fact that she’d lived her entire life in a stately manor, with servants to light fires for her. She’d never started one in a hearth, let alone in the wilderness.

Storms . . . she’d be lucky not to die of exposure out here. Or starvation. What would she do when a highstorm came? When was the next one? Tomorrow night? Or was it the night after.

“Come!” Pattern said.

He vibrated in the sand. Grains jumped and shook as he spoke, rising and falling around him. I recognize that . . . Shallan thought, frowning at him. Sand on a plate. Kabsal . . .

“Come!” Pattern repeated, more urgent.

“What?” Shallan said, standing up. Storms, but she was tired. She could barely move. “Did you find someone?”

“Yes!”

That got her attention immediately. She didn’t ask further questions, but instead followed Pattern, who moved excitedly down the coast. Would he know the difference between someone dangerous and someone friendly? For the moment, cold and exhausted, she almost didn’t care.

He stopped beside something halfway submerged in the water and seaweed at the edge of the ocean. Shallan frowned.

A trunk. Not a person, but a large wooden trunk. Shallan’s breath caught in her throat, and she dropped to her knees, working the clasps and pulling open the lid.

Inside, like a glowing treasure, were Jasnah’s books and notes, carefully packed away, protected in their waterproof enclosure.

Jasnah might not have survived, but her life’s work had.

* * *

Shallan knelt down by her improvised firepit. A grouping of rocks, filled with sticks she’d gathered from this little stand of trees. Night was almost upon her.

With it came the shocking cold, as bad as the worst winter back home. Here in the Frostlands, this would be common. Her clothing, which in this humidity hadn’t completely dried despite the hours walking, felt like ice.

She did not know how to build a fire, but perhaps she could make one in another way. She fought through her weariness—storms, but she was exhausted—and took out a glowing sphere, one of many she’d found in Jasnah’s trunk.

“All right,” she whispered. “Let’s do this.” Shadesmar.

“Mmm . . .” Pattern said. She was learning to interpret his humming. This seemed anxious. “Dangerous.”

“Why?”

“What is land here is sea there.”

Shallan nodded dully. Wait. Think.

That was growing hard, but she forced herself to go over Pattern’s words again. When they’d sailed the ocean, and she’d visited Shadesmar, she’d found obsidian ground beneath her. But in Kharbranth, she’d dropped into that ocean of spheres.

“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.

“Go slowly.”

Shallan took a deep, cold breath, then nodded. She tried as she had before. Slowly, carefully. It was like . . . like opening her eyes in the morning.

Awareness of another place consumed her. The nearby trees popped like bubbles, beads forming in their place and dropping toward a shifting sea of them below. Shallan felt herself falling.

She gasped, then blinked back that awareness, closing her metaphoric eyes. That place vanished, and in a moment, she was back in the stand of trees.

Pattern hummed nervously.

Shallan set her jaw and tried again. More slowly this time, slipping into that place with its strange sky and not-sun. For a moment, she hovered between the worlds, Shadesmar overlaying the world around her like a shadowy afterimage. Holding between the two was difficult.

Use the Light, Pattern said. Bring them.

Shallan hesitantly drew the Light into herself. The spheres in the ocean below moved like a school of fish, surging toward her, clinking together. In her exhaustion, Shallan could barely maintain her double state, and she grew woozy, looking down.

She held on, somehow.

Pattern stood beside her, in his form with the stiff clothing and a head made of impossible lines, arms clasped behind his back, and hovering as if in the air. He was tall and imposing on this side, and she absently noticed that he cast a shadow the wrong way, toward the distant, cold-seeming sun instead of away from it.

“Good,” he said, his voice a deeper hum here. “Good.” He cocked his head, and though he had no eyes, turned around as if regarding the place. “I am from here, yet I remember so little . . .”

Shallan had a sense that her time was limited. Kneeling, she reached down and felt at the sticks she’d piled to form the place for her fire. She could feel the sticks—but as she looked into this strange realm, her fingers also found one of the glass beads that had surged up beneath her.

As she touched it, she noticed something sweeping through the air above her. She cringed, looking up to find large, birdlike creatures circling around her in Shadesmar. They were a dark grey and seemed to have no specific shape, their forms blurry.

“What . . .”

“Spren,” Pattern said. “Drawn by you. Your . . . tiredness?”