Words of Radiance

“Storms, no. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“I have,” he said with an annoyed zip of a vibration. “But it is difficult to tell! You consume some things, and turn them into other things . . . Very curious things that you hide. They have value? But you leave them. Why?”

“We are done with that conversation,” Shallan said, opening her fist and holding up the sphere again. Though, admittedly, something about what he said felt right. She hadn’t eaten any spheres before, but she had somehow . . . consumed the Light. Like drinking it.

She’d breathed it in, right? She stared at the sphere for a moment, then sucked in a sharp breath.

It worked. The Light left the sphere, quick as a heartbeat, a bright line streaming into her chest. From there it spread, filling her. The unusual sensation made her feel anxious, alert, ready. Eager to be about . . . something. Her muscles tensed.

“It worked,” she said, though when she spoke, Stormlight—glowing faintly—puffed out in front of her. It rose from her skin, too. She had to practice before it all left. Lightweaving . . . She needed to create something. She decided to go with what she’d done before, improving the look of her dress.

Again, nothing happened. She didn’t know what to do, what muscles to use, or even if muscles mattered. Frustrated, she sat there trying to find a way to make the Stormlight work, feeling inept as it escaped through her skin.

It took several minutes for it to dissipate completely. “Well, that was distinctly unimpressive,” she said, moving to get more stalks of knobweed. “Maybe I should practice Soulcasting instead.”

Pattern buzzed. “Dangerous.”

“So Jasnah told me,” Shallan said. “But I don’t have her to teach me anymore, and so far as I know, she’s the only one who could have done so. It’s either practice on my own or never learn to use the ability.” She squeezed out another few drops of knobweed sap, moved to massage it into a cut on her foot, then stopped. The wound was noticeably smaller than it had been just moments ago.

“The Stormlight is healing me,” Shallan said.

“It makes you unbreak?”

“Yes. Stormfather! I’m doing things almost by accident.”

“Can something be ‘almost’ an accident?” Pattern asked, genuinely curious. “This phrase, I do not know what it means.”

“I . . . Well, it’s mostly a figure of speech.” Then, before he could ask further, she continued, “And by that I mean something we say to convey an idea or a feeling, but not a literal fact.”

Pattern buzzed.

“What does that mean?” Shallan asked, massaging the knobweed in anyway. “When you buzz like that. What are you feeling?”

“Hmmm . . . Excited. Yes. It has been so long since anyone has learned of you and your kind.”

Shallan squeezed some more sap onto her toes. “You came to learn? Wait . . . you’re a scholar?”

“Of course. Hmmm. Why else would I come? I will learn so much before—”

He stopped abruptly.

“Pattern?” she asked. “Before what?”

“A figure of speech.” He said it perfectly flatly, absent of tone. He was growing better and better at speaking like a person, and at times he sounded just like one. But now all of the color had gone from his voice.

“You’re lying,” she accused him, glancing at his pattern on the wall. He had shrunk, growing as small as a fist, half his usual size.

“Yes,” he said reluctantly.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Shallan said, surprised at the realization.

“Yes.”

“But you love lies!”

“So fascinating,” he said. “You are all so fascinating.”

“Tell me what you were going to say,” Shallan ordered. “Before you stopped yourself. I’ll know if you lie.”

“Hmmmm. You sound like her. More and more like her.”

“Tell me.”

He buzzed with an annoyed sound, quick and high pitched. “I will learn what I can of you before you kill me.”

“You think . . . You think I’m going to kill you?”

“It happened to the others,” Pattern said, his voice softer now. “It will happen to me. It is . . . a pattern.”

“This has to do with the Knights Radiant,” Shallan said, raising her hands to start braiding her hair. That would be better than leaving it wild—though without a comb and brush, even braiding it was hard. Storms, she thought, I need a bath. And soap. And a dozen other things.

“Yes,” Pattern said. “The knights killed their spren.”

“How? Why?”

“Their oaths,” Pattern said. “It is all I know. My kind, those who were unbonded, we retreated, and many kept our minds. Even still, it is hard to think apart from my kind, unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“Unless we have a person.”

“So that’s what you get out of it,” Shallan said, untangling her hair with her fingers. “Symbiosis. I get access to Surgebinding, you get thought.”

“Sapience,” Pattern said. “Thought. Life. These are of humans. We are ideas. Ideas that wish to live.”

Shallan continued working on her hair. “I’m not going to kill you,” she said firmly. “I won’t do it.”

“I don’t suppose the others intended to either,” he said. “But it is no matter.”

“It is an important matter,” Shallan said. “I won’t do it. I’m not one of the Knights Radiant. Jasnah made that clear. A man who can use a sword isn’t necessarily a soldier. Just because I can do what I do doesn’t make me one of them.”

“You spoke oaths.”

Shallan froze.

Life before death . . . The words drifted toward her from the shadows of her past. A past she would not think of.

“You live lies,” Pattern said. “It gives you strength. But the truth . . . Without speaking truths you will not be able to grow, Shallan. I know this somehow.”

She finished with her hair and moved to rewrap her feet. Pattern had moved to the other side of the rattling wagon chamber, settling onto the wall, only faintly visible in the dim light. She had a handful of infused spheres left. Not much Stormlight, considering how quickly that other had left her. Should she use what she had to further heal her feet? Could she even do that intentionally, or would the ability elude her, as Lightweaving had?

She tucked the spheres into her safepouch. She would save them, just in case. For now, these spheres and their Light might be the only weapon available to her.

Bandages redone, she stood up in the rattling wagon and found that her foot pain was nearly gone. She could walk almost normally, though she still wouldn’t want to go far without shoes. Pleased, she knocked on the wood nearest to Bluth. “Stop the wagon!”

This time, she didn’t have to repeat herself. She rounded the wagon and, taking her seat beside Bluth, immediately noticed the smoke column ahead. It had grown darker, larger, roiling violently.

“That’s no cook fire,” Shallan said.

“Aye,” Bluth said, expression dark. “Something big is burning. Probably wagons.” He glanced at her. “Whoever is up there, it doesn’t look like things went well for them.”

Scholarform shown for patience and thought.

Beware its ambitions innate.

Though study and diligence bring the reward,

Loss of innocence may be one’s fate.

—From the Listener Song of Listing, 69th stanza

“New guys are coming along, gancho,” Lopen said, taking a bite of the paper-wrapped something he was eating. “Wearing their uniforms, talking like real men. Funny. It only took them a few days. Took us weeks.”

“It took the rest of the men weeks, but not you,” Kaladin said, shading his eyes from the sun and leaning on his spear. He was still on the lighteyes’ practice grounds, watching over Adolin and Renarin—the latter of whom was receiving his first instructions from Zahel the swordmaster. “You had a good attitude from the first day we found you, Lopen.”

“Well, life was pretty good, you know?”

“Pretty good? You’d just been assigned to carry siege bridges until you died on the plateaus.”

“Eh,” Lopen said, taking a bite of his food. It looked like a thick piece of flatbread wrapped around something goopy. He licked his lips, then handed it to Kaladin to free his single hand so he could dig in his pocket for a moment. “You have bad days. You have good days. Evens out eventually.”

“You’re a strange man, Lopen,” Kaladin said, inspecting the “food” Lopen had been eating. “What is this?”

“Chouta.”

“Chowder?”

“Cha-ou-ta. Herdazian food, gon. Good stuff. You can have a bite, if you want.”

It seemed to be chunks of undefinable meat slathered in some dark liquid, all wrapped in overly thick bread. “Disgusting,” Kaladin said, handing it back as Lopen gave him the thing he’d dug out of his pocket, a shell with glyphs written on both sides.

“Your loss,” Lopen said, taking another bite.

“You shouldn’t be walking around eating like that,” Kaladin noted. “It’s rude.”