Chapter 1

I should have known I was being watched. All my life, the signs were there.

—From Knights of Wind and Truth , page 1

K aladin felt good.

Not great. Not after spending weeks hiding in an occupied city. Not after driving himself to physical and emotional exhaustion. Not after what had happened to Teft.

He stood at his window on the first morning of the month. Sunlight streamed into the room around him, wind tickling his hair. He shouldn’t have felt good. Yes, he’d helped protect Urithiru—but that victory had come at an agonizing cost. Beyond that, Dalinar had made a deal with the enemy: in just ten days, the champion of Honor and the champion of Odium would decide the fate of all Roshar.

The scope of that was terrifying, yet Kaladin had stepped down as leader of the Windrunners. He’d said the proper Words, but had realized Words alone weren’t enough. While Stormlight healed his body instantly, his soul needed time. So, if battle came, his friends would fight without him. And when the champions met atop Urithiru in ten days—nine, since the first day was underway—Kaladin wouldn’t participate.

That should have made him an anxious, stewing pot of nerves. Instead he tipped his head back, sun warm on his skin, and acknowledged that while he didn’t feel great, someday he would feel great again.

For today, that was enough.

He turned and strode to his closet, where he picked through stacks of civilian clothing neatly laundered and delivered this morning. The city was a mere two days free from occupation and the fate of the world approached, but Urithiru’s washwomen soldiered on. None of the clothes appealed to him, and shortly he glanced at another option: a uniform sent by the quartermaster to replace the one Kaladin had ruined during the fighting. Leyten kept a rack of them in Kaladin’s size.

Kaladin had stuck the uniform to the wall with a Lashing last night, after Teft’s funeral, as a test. Urithiru was awake, with its own Bondsmith, making things … different. His Lashings normally lasted minutes at best—yet here this one was, ten hours later, still going strong.

Syl poked her head into his room—past the hanging cloth doorway—without any thought for privacy. Today she appeared at full human size and wore a havah rather than her usual girlish dress. She’d recently learned how to color her dress, in this case mostly darker shades of blue with some bright violet embroidery on her sleeves.

As Kaladin fastened the last buttons on the high collar of his uniform jacket, Syl bounced over to stand behind him. Then she floated a foot or so into the air to look over his shoulder and examine him in the mirror.

“Can’t you make yourself any size?” he asked, checking his jacket cuffs.

“Within reason.”

“Whose reason?”

“No idea,” she said. “Tried to get as big as a mountain once. It involved lots of grunting and thinking like rocks. Really big rocks. Biggest I could manage was a very small mountain—small enough to fit in this room, with the tip brushing the ceiling.”

“Then you could be tall enough to tower over me,” he said. “Why do you usually make yourself shorter?”

“It just feels right,” she said.

“That’s your explanation for basically everything.”

“Yup!” She poked him. He could barely feel it. Even at this size, she was insubstantial in the Physical Realm. “Uniform? I thought you weren’t going to wear one anymore.”

He hesitated, then pulled the jacket down at the bottom to smooth the wrinkles across the sides. “It just feels right,” he admitted, meeting her eyes in the mirror.

She grinned. And storm him, he couldn’t help grinning back.

“Someone is having a good day,” she said, poking him again.

“Bizarrely,” Kaladin said. “Considering.”

“At least the war is almost over,” she said. “One more contest. Nine days.”

True. If Dalinar won, Odium had agreed to withdraw from Alethkar and Herdaz—though he could keep other lands he controlled, like Iri and Jah Keved. If Odium won, they were forced to cede Alethkar to the enemy. Plus there was a greater cost. If Dalinar lost, he had to join Odium, become Fused, and help conquer the cosmere. Kaladin wanted to think that the Radiants wouldn’t follow as well, but he wasn’t certain. So many people thirsted for war, even without the influence of an Unmade. Storms, he’d felt it too.

“Syl,” he said, dropping his smile. “I’m sure more people are going to die. Perhaps people I care about, but I can’t be there to help them. Dalinar will have to choose someone else to be champion and—”

“ Kaladin Stormblessed, ” she said, rising higher into the air, arms folded. Though she wore a fashionable havah, she left her hair white-blue, flowing free, waving and shifting in the wind. The … nonexistent wind. “Don’t you dare talk yourself into being miserable.”

“Or what?”

“Or I,” she thundered, “shall make silly faces at you. As I alone can.”

“They aren’t silly,” he said, shivering.

“They’re hilarious. ”

“Last time you made a tentacle come out of your forehead.”

“Highbrow comedy.”

“Then it slapped me.”

“Punch line. Obviously. All the humans in the world, and I picked the one without a taste for refined humor.”

He met her eyes, and her smile was still storming infectious.

“It does feel warm,” he said, “to have finally figured a few things out. To let go of the weight and step out from the shadow. I know darkness will return, but I think … I think I’ll be able to remember better than before.”

“Remember what?”

He Lashed himself upward, floating until he was eye level with her. “That days like this exist too.”

She nodded firmly.

“I wish I could show Teft,” Kaladin said. “I feel his loss like a hole in my own flesh, Syl.”

“I know,” she said softly.

If she’d been a human friend, she might have offered a hug. Syl didn’t seem to understand physicality like a human did, though where she’d been born—Shadesmar, the Cognitive Realm—she had a substantial body. He had the sense she hadn’t spent much time on that side. This realm suited her.

Dropping to the ground, Kaladin walked back to the window, wanting to feel the sunlight. Outside he saw the heights of the mountains, capped by snow. Wind blew across him, bringing with it fresh scents of clean, crisp air and a flock of windspren. Including those that made up his armor, who soared in around him. They stayed close, in case they were needed.

Storms, he’d been through so much so quickly. He felt echoes of an anger that had almost entirely consumed him at Teft’s death. Worse, the feeling of nothingness as he fell …

Dark days.

But days like this existed too.

And he would remember.

His armor spren laughed and danced out the window, but the wind lingered, playing with his hair. Then it calmed, still blowing across him, but no longer playful, more … contemplative. All through his life, the wind had been there. He knew it almost like he did his hometown or his family. Familiar …

Kaladin …

He jumped, then glanced at Syl, who was walking through the room in a half dance, half stride, her eyes closed—as if moving to an inaudible beat.

“Syl,” Kaladin said, “did you say my name?”

“Huh?” she said, opening her eyes.

Kaladin …

Storms. There it was again.

I need your help. I’m so sorry … to ask more of you …

“Tell me you hear that,” Kaladin said to Syl.

“I feel …” She cocked her head. “I feel something. On the wind.”

“It’s speaking to me,” he said, one hand to his head.

A storm is coming, Kaladin, the wind whispered. The worst storm … I’m sorry …

It was gone.

“What did you hear?” Syl asked.

“A warning,” he said, frowning. “Syl, is the wind … alive?”

“Everything is alive.”

He gazed outward, waiting for the voice to return. It didn’t. Just that crisp breeze—though now it didn’t seem calm.

Now it seemed to be waiting for something.

Shallan lingered atop Lasting Integrity, the great fortress of the honorspren, thinking about all the people she’d been. The way she changed, based on perspective.

Indeed, life was largely about perspective.

Like this strange structure: a hollow, rectangular block hundreds of feet tall, dominating Shadesmar’s landscape. People—spren—lived along the inside walls, walking up and down them, ignoring conventions of gravity. Looking down along one of the inside walls could be stomach-churning unless you changed your perspective. Unless you convinced yourself that walking up and down that wall was normal. Whether a person was strong or not wasn’t usually subject to debate, yet if gravity could be a matter of opinion …

She turned away from the heart of Lasting Integrity and walked along the very top of the wall. Looking outward to survey Shadesmar: rolling ocean of beads in one direction, jagged obsidian highlands—lined with crystalline trees—in the other. On the wall with her, an even more daunting sight: two spren with heads made of geometric lines, each wearing a robe of some too-stiff glossy black material.

Two spren.

She’d bonded two. One during her childhood. One as an adult. She’d hurt the first, and had suppressed the memory.

Shallan knelt before Testament, her original spren. The Cryptic sat with her back to the stone railing. The lines and pattern that made up her head were crooked, like broken twigs. In the center the lines were scratched and rough, as if someone had taken a knife to them. More telling, her pattern was almost frozen.

Nearby, Pattern’s head pulsed to a vibrant rhythm—always moving, always forming some new geometric display. Comparing the two broke Shallan’s heart. She had done this to Testament by rejecting the bond after using her Shardblade to kill her mother.

Testament reached out with a long-fingered hand, and Shallan—pained—took it. It gripped hers lightly, but Shallan had the sense that was all the strength Testament had. She responded to being a deadeye differently from Maya, who stood nearby with Adolin and Kelek. Maya had always seemed strong of body, in spite of being a deadeye. Spren broke in different ways, it appeared. Just like people.

Testament squeezed Shallan’s hand, bearing no expression but that torpid motion of lines.

“Why?” Shallan asked. “Why don’t you hate me?”

Pattern rested his hand on Shallan’s shoulder. “We both knew the danger, the sacrifice, in bonding to humans again.”

“I hurt her.”

“Yet here you are,” Pattern said. “Able to stand tall. Able to control the Surges. Able to protect this world.”

“She should hate me,” Shallan whispered. “But there is no vitriol in the way she holds my hand. No judgment in the way she remains with us.”

“Because the sacrifice was worth something, Shallan,” Pattern said, uncharacteristically reserved. “It worked. In the end you recovered, did better. I am still here. And remarkably, I am not even a little bit dead! I do not think you will kill me at all, Shallan! I am happy about that.”

“Can I heal her?” Shallan asked. “Maybe if I … if I bond her again?”

“I think, after talking to Kelek …” Pattern said. “I think you are still bonded to her.”

“But …” Shallan glanced over her shoulder at him. “I broke the bond. That did this.”

“Some breaks are messy,” Pattern said. “A slice with a sharpened knife is clean; a slice with a dull one is ragged. Your break, done by a child without full Intent, is ragged. In some ways that makes it worse, but it does mean that some Connection between you two persists.”

“So …”

“So no,” Pattern said. “I do not think that merely saying Words once more would heal her.” His head pattern spun a little more slowly, as if he were contemplating something profound. “These numbers are … perplexing, Shallan. Strangely irrational, in a sequence I do not understand. I mean … I mean that we are walking on unfamiliar ground. A better metaphor for you. Yes. Unfamiliar ground. In the deep past, deadeyes did not exist.”

It was what they’d learned, in part, from the honorspren and from Maya. The deadeyes—all of them except Testament—had been bonded to ancient Radiants before the Recreance. Together they’d rejected their oaths, humans and spren alike. They’d thought it would cause a painful, but survivable split. Instead, something had gone terribly wrong.

The result had been the deadeyes. The explanation might lie with Kelek, the very person Shallan had been sent to Lasting Integrity to kill. She squeezed Testament’s hand. “I’m going to help you,” Shallan whispered. “ Whatever it takes.”

Testament didn’t respond, but Shallan leaned in, wrapping her arms around the Cryptic. Pattern’s robe always felt hard, yet Testament’s bent like cloth.

“Thank you,” Shallan said. “For coming to me when I was young. Thank you for protecting me. I still do not remember it all, but thank you. ”

The Cryptic slowly, but deliberately, put her arms around Shallan and squeezed back.

“Rest now,” Shallan said, wiping her eyes and standing. “I’m going to figure this out.”