Words of Radiance Page 17

  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?”

  “Exhaustionspren?” she asked, shocked by their size here.

  “Yes.”

  She shivered, then looked down at the sphere beneath her hand. She was dangerously close to falling into Shadesmar completely, and could barely see the impressions of the physical realm around her. Only those beads. She felt as if she would tumble into their sea at any moment.

  “Please,” Shallan said to the sphere. “I need you to become fire.”

  Pattern buzzed, speaking with a new voice, interpreting the sphere’s words. “I am a stick,” he said. He sounded satisfied.

  “You could be fire,” Shallan said.

  “I am a stick.”

  The stick was not particularly eloquent. She supposed that she shouldn’t be surprised.

  “Why don’t you become fire instead?”

  “I am a stick.”

  “How do I make it change?” Shallan asked of Pattern.

  “Mm . . . I do not know. You must persuade it. Offer it truths, I think?” He sounded agitated. “This place is dangerous for you. For us. Please. Speed.”

  She looked back at the stick.

  “You want to burn.”

 
“I am a stick.”

  “Think how much fun it would be?”

  “I am a stick.”

  “Stormlight,” Shallan said. “You could have it! All that I’m holding.”

  A pause. Finally, “I am a stick.”

  “Sticks need Stormlight. For . . . things . . .” Shallan blinked away tears of fatigue.

  “I am—”

  “—a stick,” Shallan said. She gripped the sphere, feeling both it and the stick in the physical realm, trying to think through another argument. For a moment, she hadn’t felt quite so tired, but it was returning—crashing back upon her. Why . . .

  Her Stormlight was running out.

  It was gone in a moment, drained from her, and she exhaled, slipping into Shadesmar with a sigh, feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

  She fell into the sea of spheres. That awful blackness, millions of moving bits, consuming her.

  She threw herself from Shadesmar.

  The spheres expanded outward, growing into sticks and rocks and trees, restoring the world as she knew it. She collapsed into her small stand of trees, heart pounding.

  All grew normal around her. No more distant sun, no more sea of spheres. Just frigid cold, a night sky, and biting wind that blew between the trees. The single sphere she’d drained slipped from her fingers, clicking against the stone ground. She leaned back against Jasnah’s trunk. Her arms still ached from dragging that up the beach to the trees.

  She huddled there, frightened. “Do you know how to make fire?” she asked Pattern. Her teeth chattered. Stormfather. She didn’t feel cold anymore, but her teeth were chattering, and her breath was visible as vapor in the starlight.

  She found herself growing drowsy. Maybe she should just sleep, then try to deal with it all in the morning.

  “Change?” Pattern asked. “Offer the change.”

  “I tried.”

  “I know.” His vibrations sounded depressed.

  Shallan stared at that pile of sticks, feeling utterly useless. What was it Jasnah had said? Control is the basis of all true power? Authority and strength are matters of perception? Well, this was a direct refutation of that. Shallan could imagine herself as grand, could act like a queen, but that didn’t change a thing out here in the wilderness.

  Well, Shallan thought, I’m not going to sit here and freeze to death. I’ll at least freeze to death trying to find help.

  She didn’t move, though. Moving was hard. At least here, huddled by the trunk, she didn’t have to feel the wind so much. Just lying here until morning . . .

  She curled into a ball.

  No. This didn’t seem right. She coughed, then somehow got to her feet. She stumbled away from her not-fire, dug a sphere from her safepouch, then started walking.

  Pattern moved at her feet. Those were bloodier now. She left a red trail on the rock. She couldn’t feel the cuts.

  She walked and walked.

  And walked.

  And . . .

  Light.

  She didn’t move any more quickly. She couldn’t. But she did keep going, shambling directly toward that pinprick in the darkness. A numb part of her worried that the light was really Nomon, the second moon. That she’d march toward it and fall off the edge of Roshar itself.

  So she surprised herself by stumbling right into the middle of a small group of people sitting around a campfire. She blinked, looking from one face to another; then—ignoring the sounds they made, for words were meaningless to her in this state—she walked to the campfire and lay down, curled up, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  “Brightness?”

  Shallan grumbled, rolling over. Her face hurt. No, her feet hurt. Her face was nothing compared to that pain.

  If she slept a little longer, maybe it would fade. At least for that time. . . .

  “B-Brightness?” the voice asked again. “Are you feeling well, yes?”

  That was a Thaylen accent. Dredged from deep within her, a light surfaced, bringing memories. The ship. Thaylens. The sailors?

  Shallan forced her eyes open. The air smelled faintly of smoke from the still-smoldering fire. The sky was a deep violet, brightening as the sun broke the horizon. She’d slept on hard rock, and her body ached.

  She didn’t recognize the speaker, a portly Thaylen man with a white beard wearing a knit cap and an old suit and vest, patched in a few inconspicuous places. He wore his white Thaylen eyebrows tucked up over his ears. Not a sailor. A merchant.

  Shallan stifled a groan, sitting up. Then, in a moment of panic, she checked her safehand. One of her fingers had slipped out of the sleeve, and she pulled it back in. The Thaylen’s eyes flicked toward it, but he said nothing.

  “You are well, then?” the man asked. He spoke in Alethi. “We were going to pack to go, you see. Your arrival last night was . . . unexpected. We did not wish to disturb you, but thought perhaps you would want to wake before we depart.”

  Shallan ran her freehand through her hair, a mess of red locks stuck with twigs. Two other men—tall, hulking, and of Vorin descent—packed up blankets and bedrolls. She’d have killed for one of those during the night. She remembered tossing uncomfortably.

  Stilling the needs of nature, she turned and was surprised to see three large chull wagons with cages on the back. Inside were a handful of dirty, shirtless men. It took just a moment for it all to click.

  Slavers.

  She shoved down an initial burst of panic. Slaving was a perfectly legal profession. Most of the time. Only this was the Frostlands, far from the rule of any group or nation. Who was to say what was legal here and what was not?

  Be calm, she told herself forcefully. They wouldn’t have awakened you politely if they were planning something like that.

  Selling a Vorin woman of high dahn—which the dress marked her as being—would be a risky gambit for a slaver. Most owners in civilized lands would require documentation of the slave’s past, and it was rare indeed that a lighteyes was made a slave, aside from ardents. Usually someone of higher breeding would simply be executed instead. Slavery was a mercy for the lower classes.

  “Brightness?” the slaver asked nervously.

  She was thinking like a scholar again, to distract herself. She’d need to get past that.

  “What is your name?” Shallan asked. She hadn’t intended to make her voice quite so emotionless, but the shock of what she’d seen left her in turmoil.

  The man stepped back at her tone. “I am Tvlakv, humble merchant.”

  “Slaver,” Shallan said, standing up and pushing her hair back from her face.

  “As I said. A merchant.”

  His two guards watched her as they loaded equipment onto the lead wagon. She did not miss the cudgels they carried prominently at their waists. She’d had a sphere in her hand as she walked last night, hadn’t she?

  Memories of that made her feet flare up again. She had to grit her teeth against the agony as painspren, like orange hands made of sinew, clawed out of the ground nearby. She’d need to clean her wounds, but bloodied and bruised as they were, she wasn’t going to be walking anywhere anytime soon. Those wagons had seats. . . .

  They likely stole the sphere from me, she thought. She felt around in her safepouch. The other spheres were still there, but the the sleeve was unbuttoned. Had she done that? Had they peeked? She couldn’t suppress a blush at the thought.

  The two guards regarded her hungrily. Tvlakv acted humble, but his leering eyes were also very eager. These men were one step from robbing her.

  But if she left them, she’d probably die out here, alone. Stormfather! What could she do? She felt like sitting down and sobbing. After everything that had happened, now this?

  Control is the basis of all power.

  How would Jasnah respond to this situation?

  The answer was simple. She would be Jasnah.

  “I will allow you to assist me,” Shallan said. She somehow kept her voice even, despite the anxious terror she felt inside.

 
“. . . Brightness?” Tvlakv asked.

  “As you can see,” Shallan said, “I am the victim of a shipwreck. My servants are lost to me. You and your men will do. I have a trunk. We will need to go fetch it.”

  She felt like one of the ten fools. Surely he would see through the flimsy act. Pretending you had authority was not the same as having it, no matter what Jasnah said.

  “It would . . . of course be our privilege to help,” Tvlakv said. “Brightness . . . ?”

  “Davar,” Shallan said, though she took care to soften her voice. Jasnah wasn’t condescending. Where other lighteyes, like Shallan’s father, went about with conceited egotism, Jasnah had simply expected people to do as she wished. And they had.

  She could make this work. She had to.

  “Tradesman Tvlakv,” Shallan said. “I will need to go to the Shattered Plains. Do you know the way?”

  “The Shattered Plains?” the man asked, glancing at his guards, one of whom had approached. “We were there a few months ago, but are now heading to catch a barge over to Thaylenah. We have completed our trading in this area, with no need to return northward.”

  “Ah, but you do have a need to return,” Shallan said, walking toward one of the wagons. Each step was agony. “To take me.” She glanced around, and gratefully noticed Pattern on the side of a wagon, watching. She walked to the front of that wagon, then held out her hand to the other guard, who stood nearby.

  He looked at the hand mutely, scratching his head. Then he looked at the wagon and climbed onto it, reaching down to help her up.

  Tvlakv walked over to her. “It will be an expensive trip for us to return without wares! I have only these slaves I purchased at the Shallow Crypts. Not enough to justify the trip back, not yet.”

  “Expensive?” Shallan asked, seating herself, trying to project amusement. “I assure you, tradesman Tvlakv, the expense is minuscule to me. You will be greatly compensated. Now, let us be moving. There are important people waiting for me at the Shattered Plains.”