The Way of Kings - By Brandon Sanderson Page 0,117

war?” Kal asked.

“Um. Yes. I am.”

“Make sense,” he said. An army had come through recruiting just a few weeks back and had picked up a few of the older boys, though only after Citylord Wistiow had given permission. “What do you think broke the rocks here, during the highstorm?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Kal looked eastward. What sent the storms? His father said no ship had ever sailed for the Origin of Storms and returned safely. Few ships ever even left the coast. Being caught on the open seas during a storm meant death, so the stories said.

He took another sip from his flask, then capped it, saving the rest in case Tien found another lurg. Distant men worked the fields, wearing overalls, laced brown shirts, and sturdy boots. It was worming season. A single worm could ruin an entire polyp’s worth of grain. It would incubate inside, slowly eating as the grain grew. When you finally opened up the polyp in the fall, all you’d find was a big fat slug the size of two men’s hands. And so they searched in the spring, going over each polyp. Where they found a burrow, they’d stick in a reed tipped with sugar, which the worm would latch on to. You pulled it out and squished it under your heel, then patched the hole with crem.

It could take weeks to properly worm a field, and farmers usually went over their hills three or four times, fertilizing as they went. Kal had heard the process described a hundred times over. You didn’t live in a town like Hearthstone without listening to men gripe about worms.

Oddly, he noticed a group older boys gathering at the foot of one of the hills. He recognized all of them, of course. Jost and Jest, brothers. Mord, Tift, Naget, Khav, and others. They each had solid, Alethi darkeyes names. Not like Kaladin’s own name. It was different.

“Why aren’t they worming?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Laral said, shifting her attention to the boys. She got an odd look in her eyes. “Let’s go see.” She started down the hillside before Kal had a chance to object.

He scratched his head, looking toward Tien. “We’re going down to the hillside there.”

A youthful head popped up behind a boulder. Tien nodded energetically, then turned back to his searching. Kal slipped off the boulder and walked down the slope after Laral. She reached the boys, and they regarded her with uncomfortable expressions. She’d never spent much time with them, not like she had with Kal and Tien. Her father and his were pretty good friends, for all that one was lighteyed and the other dark.

Laral took a perch on a nearby rock, waiting and saying nothing. Kal walked up. Why had she wanted to come down here, if she wasn’t going to talk to the other boys?

“Ho, Jost,” Kal said. Senior among the boys at fourteen, Jost was nearly a man—and he looked it too. His chest was broad beyond his years, his legs thick and stocky, like those of his father. He was holding a length of wood from a sapling that had been shaved into a rough approximation of a quarterstaff. “Why aren’t you worming?”

It was the wrong thing to say, and Kal knew it immediately. Several of the boys’ expressions darkened. It was a sore point to them that Kal never had to work the hills. His protests—that he spent hours upon hours memorizing muscles, bones, and cures—fell on uncaring ears. All they saw was a boy who got to spend his days in the shade while they toiled in the burning sun.

“Old Tarn found a patch of polyps that ain’t growing right,” Jost finally said, shooting a glance at Laral. “Let us go for the day while they talked over whether to try another planting there, or just let them grow and see what comes of it.”

Kal nodded, feeling awkward as he stood before the nine boys. They were sweaty, the knees of their trousers stained with crem and patched from rubbing stone. But Kal was clean, wearing a fine pair of trousers his mother had purchased just a few weeks before. His father had sent him and Tien out for the day while he tended to something at the citylord’s manor. Kal would pay for the break with late-night studying by Stormlight, but no use explaining that to the other boys.

“So, er,” Kal said, “what were you all talking about?”

Rather than answering, Naget said, “Kal, you know things.” Light haired