Words of Radiance

Cowards, she thought again, or just men disillusioned? Rocks who started rolling down a hillside, only to start going so quickly they don’t know how to stop?

It didn’t matter. Those rocks would crush Shallan and the others, if given the chance. Cutting eastward wouldn’t work. The deserters would take the easy kill—slow-moving wagons—instead of the potentially harder kill straight ahead.

“We make for the second column of smoke,” Shallan said, sitting down.

Tvlakv looked at her. “You don’t get to—” He broke off as she met his eyes.

“You . . .” Tvlakv said, licking his lips. “You won’t get . . . to the Shattered Plains as quickly, Brightness, if we get tied up with a larger caravan, you see. It could be bad.”

“I will deal with that if the problem arises, tradesman Tvlakv.”

“Those ahead will keep moving,” Tvlakv warned. “We may arrive at that camp and find them gone.”

“In which case,” Shallan said, “they will either be moving toward the Shattered Plains or coming this way, along the corridor toward the port cities. We will intersect them eventually one way or another.”

Tvlakv sighed, then nodded, calling to Tag to hurry.

Shallan sat down, feeling a thrill. Bluth returned and took his seat, then shoved a few wizened roots in her direction. Lunch, apparently. Shortly, the wagons began rolling northward, Shallan’s wagon falling into place third in line this time.

Shallan settled into her seat for the trip—they were hours away from that second group, even if they did manage to catch up to it. To keep from worrying, she finished her sketches of the landscape. She then turned to idle sketches, simply letting her pencil go where it willed.

She drew skyeels dancing in the air. She drew the docks of Kharbranth. She did a sketch of Yalb, though the face felt off to her, and she didn’t quite capture the mischievous spark in his eyes. Perhaps the errors related to how sad she became, thinking of what had probably happened to him.

She flipped the page and started a random sketch, whatever came into her mind. Her pencil moved into a depiction of an elegant woman in a stately gown. Loose but sleek below the waist, tight across the chest and stomach. Long, open sleeves, one hiding the safehand, the other cut at the elbow exposing the forearm and draping down below.

A bold, poised woman. In control. Still drawing unconsciously, Shallan added her own face to the elegant woman’s head.

She hesitated, pencil hovering above the image. That wasn’t her. Was it? Could it be?

She stared at that image as the wagon bumped over rocks and plants. She flipped to the next page and started another drawing. A ball gown, a woman at court, surrounded by the elite of Alethkar as she imagined them. Tall, strong. The woman belonged among them.

Shallan added her face to the figure.

She flipped the page and did another one. And then another.

The last one was a sketch of her standing at the edge of the Shattered Plains as she imagined them. Looking eastward, toward the secrets that Jasnah had sought.

Shallan flipped the page and drew again. A picture of Jasnah on the ship, seated at her desk, papers and books sprawled around her. It wasn’t the setting that mattered, but the face. That worried, terrified face. Exhausted, pushed to her limits.

Shallan got this one right. The first drawing since the disaster that captured perfectly what she’d seen. Jasnah’s burden.

“Stop the wagon,” Shallan said, not looking up.

Bluth glanced at her. She resisted the urge to say it again. He didn’t, unfortunately, obey immediately.

“Why?” he demanded.

Shallan looked up. The smoke column was still distant, but she’d been right, it was growing thicker. The group ahead had stopped and built a sizable fire for the midday meal. Judging by that smoke, they were a much larger group than the one behind.

“I’m going to get into the back,” Shallan said. “I need to look something up. You can continue when I’m settled, but please stop and call to me once we’re near to the group ahead.”

He sighed, but stopped the chull with a few whacks on the shell. Shallan climbed down, then took the knobweed and notebook, moved to the back of the wagon. Once she was in, Bluth started up again immediately, shouting back to Tvlakv, who had demanded to know the meaning of the delay.

With the walls up her wagon was shaded and private, particularly with it being last in line so nobody could look in the back door at her. Unfortunately, riding in the back wasn’t as comfortable as riding in the front. Those tiny rockbuds caused a surprising amount of jarring and jolting.

Jasnah’s trunk was tied in place near the front wall. She opened the lid—letting the spheres inside provide dusky illumination—then settled back on her improvised cushion, a pile of the cloths Jasnah had used to wrap her books. The blanket she used at night—as Tvlakv had been unable to produce one for her—was the velvet lining she had ripped out of the trunk.

Settling back, she unwrapped her feet to apply the new knobweed. They were scabbed over and much improved from their condition just a day before. “Pattern?”

He vibrated from somewhere nearby. She’d asked him to remain in the back so as to not alarm Tvlakv and the guards.

“My feet are healing,” she said. “Did you do this?”

“Mmmm . . . I know almost nothing of why people break. I know less of why they . . . unbreak.”

“Your kind don’t get wounded?” she asked, snapping off a knobweed stem and squeezing the drops onto her left foot.

“We break. We just do it . . . differently than men do. And we do not unbreak without aid. I do not know why you unbreak. Why?”

“It is a natural function of our bodies,” she said. “Living things repair themselves automatically.” She held one of her spheres close, searching for signs of little red rotspren. Where she found a few of them along one cut, she was quick to apply sap and chase them off.

“I would like to know why things work,” Pattern said.

“So would many of us,” Shallan said, bent over. She grimaced as the wagon hit a particularly large rock. “I made myself glow last night, by the fire with Tvlakv.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“Lies.”

“My dress changed,” Shallan said. “I swear the scuffs and rips were gone last night. They’ve returned now, though.”

“Mmm. Yes.”

“I have to be able to control this thing we can do. Jasnah called it Lightweaving. She implied it was far safer to practice than Soulcasting.”

“The book?”

Shallan frowned, sitting back against the bars on the side of the wagon. Beside her, a long line of scratches on the floor looked like they’d been made by fingernails. As if one of the slaves had tried, in a fit of madness, to claw his way to freedom.

The book Jasnah had given her, Words of Radiance, had been swallowed by the ocean. It seemed a greater loss than the other one Jasnah had given her, the Book of Endless Pages, which had strangely been blank. She didn’t understand the full significance of that yet.

“I never got a chance to actually read that book,” Shallan said. “We’ll need to see if we can find another copy once we reach the Shattered Plains.” Their destination being a warcamp, though, she doubted that many books would be for sale.

Shallan held one of her spheres up before herself. It was growing dim, and needed to be reinfused. What would happen if the highstorm came, and they hadn’t caught up to the group ahead? Would the deserters push through the storm itself to reach them? And, potentially, the safety of their wagons?

Storms, what a mess. She needed an edge. “The Knights Radiant formed a bond with spren,” Shallan said, more to herself than to Pattern. “It was a symbiotic relationship, like a little cremling who lives in the shalebark. The cremling cleans off the lichen, getting food, but also keeping the shalebark clean.”

Pattern buzzed in confusion. “Am I . . . the shalebark or the cremling?”

“Either,” Shallan said, turning the diamond sphere in her fingers—the tiny gemstone trapped inside glowed with a vigilant light, suspended in glass. “The Surges—the forces that run the world—are more pliable to spren. Or . . . well . . . since spren are pieces of those Surges, maybe it’s that the spren are better at influencing one another. Our bond gives me the ability to manipulate one of the Surges. In this case, light, the power of Illumination.”

“Lies,” Pattern whispered. “And truths.”

Shallan gripped the sphere in her fist, the light shining through her skin making her hand glow red. She willed the Light to enter her, but nothing happened. “So, how do I make it work?”

“Perhaps eat it?” Pattern said, moving over onto the wall beside her head.

“Eat it?” Shallan asked, skeptical. “I didn’t need to eat it before to get the Stormlight.”

“Might work, though. Try?”

“I doubt I could swallow an entire sphere,” Shallan said. “Even if I wanted to, which I distinctly do not.”

“Mmmm,” Pattern said, his vibrations making the wood shake. “This . . . is not one of the things humans like to eat, then?”