The Way of Kings

She did it! Kaladin thought. What has she done to me?

He stumbled away from Lopen and Teft, running toward Syl. His footsteps propelling him forward with too much speed. “Syl!” he bellowed, stopping beneath her.

She zipped down to hover before him, changing from a leaf to a young woman standing in the air. “Yes?”

Kaladin glanced around. “Come with me,” he said, hurrying to one of the alleys between barracks. He pressed himself up against a wall, standing in the shade, breathing in and out. Nobody could see him here.

Syl alighted in the air before him, hands behind her back, looking closely at him. “You’re glowing.”

“What have you done to me?”

She cocked her head, then shrugged.

“Syl…” he said threateningly, though he wasn’t certain what harm he could do a spren.

“I don’t know, Kaladin,” she said frankly, sitting down, her legs hanging over the side of the invisible platform. “I can…I can only faintly remember things I used to know so well. This world, interacting with men.”

“But you did do something.”

“We have done something. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t you. But together…” She shrugged again.

“That isn’t very helpful.”

She grimaced. “I know. I’m sorry.”

Kaladin raised a hand. In the shade, the light streaming off of him was more obvious. If someone walked by…“How do I get rid of it?”

“Why do you want to get rid of it?”

“Well, because…I…Because.”

Syl didn’t respond.

Something occurred to Kaladin. Something, perhaps, he should have asked long ago. “You’re not a windspren, are you?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No.”

“What are you, then?”

“I don’t know. I bind things.”

Bind things. When she played pranks, she made items stick together. Shoes stuck to the ground and made men trip. People reached for their jackets hanging on hooks and couldn’t pull them free. Kaladin reached down, picking a stone up off the ground. It was as big as his palm, weathered smooth by highstorm winds and rain. He pressed it against the wall of the barrack and willed his Light into the stone.

He felt a chill. The rock began to stream with luminescent vapors. When Kaladin pulled his hand away, the stone remained where it was, clinging to the side of the building.

Kaladin leaned close, squinting. He thought he could faintly make out tiny spren, dark blue and shaped like little splashes of ink, clustering around the place where the rock met the wall.

“Bindspren,” Syl said, walking up beside his head; she was still standing in the air.

“They’re holding the rock in place.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they’re attracted to what you’ve done in affixing the stone there.”

“That’s not how it works. Is it?”

“Do rotspren cause sickness,” Syl said idly, “or are they attracted to it?”

“Everyone knows they cause it.”

“And do windspren cause the wind? Rainspren cause the rain? Flamespren cause fires?”

He hesitated. No, they didn’t. Did they? “This is pointless. I need to find out how to get rid of this light, not study it.”

“And why,” Syl repeated, “must you get rid of it? Kaladin, you’ve heard the stories. Men who walked on walls, men who bound the storms to them. Windrunners. Why would you want to be rid of something like this?”

Kaladin struggled to define it. The healing, the way he never got hit, running at the front of the bridge…Yes, he’d known something odd was happening. Why did it frighten him so? Was it because he feared being set apart, like his father always was as the surgeon in Hearthstone? Or was it something greater?

“I’m doing what the Radiants did,” he said.

“That’s what I just said.”

“I’ve been wondering if I’m bad luck, or if I’ve run afoul of something like the Old Magic. Maybe this explains it! The Almighty cursed the Lost Radiants for betraying mankind. What if I’m cursed too, because of what I’m doing?”

“Kaladin,” she said, “you are not cursed.”

“You just said you don’t know what’s happening.” He paced in the alleyway. To the side, the rock finally plopped free and clattered to the ground. “Can you say, with all certainty, that what I’m doing might not have drawn bad luck down upon me? Do you know enough to deny it completely, Syl?”

She stood in the air, her arms folded, saying nothing.

“This…thing,” Kaladin said, gesturing toward the stone. “It isn’t natural. The Radiants betrayed mankind. Their powers left them, and they were cursed. Everyone knows the legends.” He looked down at his hands, still glowing, though more faintly than before. “Whatever we’ve done, whatever has happened to me, I’ve somehow brought upon myself their same curse. That’s why everyone around me dies when I try to help them.”

“And you think I’m a curse?” she asked him.

“I…Well, you said you’re part of it, and…”

She strode forward, pointing at him, a tiny, irate woman hanging in the air. “So you think I’ve caused all of this? Your failures? The deaths?”

Kaladin didn’t respond. He realized almost immediately that silence might be the worst response. Syl- surprisingly human in her emotions-spun in the air with a wounded look and zipped away, forming a ribbon of light.

I’m overreacting, he told himself. He was just so unsettled. He leaned back against the wall, hand to head. Before he had time to collect his thoughts, shadows darkened the entry to the alleyway. Teft and Lopen.

“Rock talkers!” Lopen said. “You really shine in shade, gancho!”

Teft gripped Lopen’s shoulder. “He’s not going to tell anyone, lad. I’ll make certain of it.”

“Yeah, gancho,” Lopen said. “I swore I’d say nothing. You can trust a Herdazian.”

Kaladin looked at the two, overwhelmed. He pushed past them, running out of the alley and across the lumberyard, fleeing from watching eyes.

By the time night drew close, the light had long since stopped streaming from Kaladin’s body. It had faded like a fire going out, and had only taken a few minutes to vanish.

Kaladin walked southward along the edge of the Shattered Plains, in that transitional area between the warcamps and the Plains themselves. In some areas-like at the staging area near Sadeas’s lumbercamp-there was a soft slope leading down between the two. At other points, there was a short ridge, eight or so feet tall. He passed one of these now, rocks to his right, open Plains to his left.

Hollows, crevasses, and nooks scored the rock. Some shadowed sections here still hid pools of water from the highstorms days ago. Creatures still scuttled around the rocks, though the cooling evening air would soon drive them to hide. He passed a place pocked with small, water-filled holes; cremlings-multilegged, bearing tiny claws, their elongated bodies plated with carapace-lapped and fed at the edges. A small tentacle snapped out, yanking one down into the hole. Probably a grasper.

Grass grew up the side of the ridge beside him, and the blades peeked from their holes. Bunches of fingermoss sprouted like flowers amid the green. The bright pink and purple fingermoss tendrils were reminiscent of tentacles themselves, waving at him in the wind. When he passed, the timid grass pulled back, but the fingermoss was bolder. The clumps would only pull into their shells if he tapped the rock near them.

Above him, on the ridge, a few scouts stood watch over the Shattered Plains. This area beneath the ridge belonged to no specific highprince, and the scouts ignored Kaladin. He would only be stopped if he tried to leave the