current problems before creating new ones.
Nearby, Lirin gave up, lowering his head and slumping in place as he knelt before the body. It had stopped moving, finally.
“We’ll need to hide,” Kaladin said to his father. “I’ll fetch Mother.” He surveyed his bloody clothing. “Perhaps you should do that, actually.”
“How dare you!” Lirin whispered, his voice hoarse.
Kaladin hesitated, shocked.
“How dare you kill in this place!” Lirin shouted, turning on Kaladin, angerspren pooling at his feet. “My sanctuary. The place where we heal! What is wrong with you?”
“They were going to take Teft,” Kaladin said. “Kill him.”
“You don’t know that!” Lirin said. He stared at his bloodied hands. “You … You just…” He took a deep breath. “The Fused are probably gathering the Radiants to keep them in one location, and watch to see that none of them wake up!”
“You don’t know that,” Kaladin said. “I wasn’t going to let them take him. He’s my friend.”
“Is that it, or did you just want an excuse?” Lirin’s hands trembled as he tried to wipe the blood onto his trousers. When he looked back at Kaladin, something seemed to have broken in him, tears on his cheeks. Storms, he seemed exhausted.
“Heralds above…” Lirin whispered. “They really did kill my boy, didn’t they? What have they done to you?”
Kaladin’s smidgen of Stormlight ran out. Damnation, he was so tired. “I’ve tried to tell you. Your boy died years ago.”
Lirin stared at the floor, wet with blood. “Go. They’ll come for you now.”
“You need to go into hiding with me,” Kaladin said. “They’ll know you’re my—”
“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Lirin snapped.
“Don’t play the sixth fool, Father,” Kaladin said. “You can’t let them take you after this.”
“I can and will!” Lirin shouted, standing up. “Because I will take responsibility for what I’ve done! I will work within whatever confines I must in order to protect people! I have taken oaths not to harm!” He grimaced, sickened. “Oh, Almighty. You murdered a man inside my home.”
“It wasn’t murder,” Kaladin said.
Lirin didn’t respond.
“It wasn’t murder.”
Lirin sank to the floor. “Just … go,” he said, his voice growing soft again. The grief in it, the disappointment, was far worse than the anger had been. “I will … find a way to get the rest of us out of this. That singer saw me trying to make you stop. They won’t harm a surgeon who didn’t fight. But you, they’ll kill.”
Kaladin hesitated. Could he really leave them here?
“Storms…” Lirin whispered. “Storms, my son has become a monster.…”
Kaladin steeled himself, then slipped into the back room and recovered an extra pouch of spheres he kept there. Then he returned to the exam room, trying—and failing—to avoid the blood. He lifted Teft with a grunt, putting him in a medic’s carry across his back.
“I’ve taken oaths too, Father,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m not the man you wanted me to be. But if I were a monster, I would never have let that other soldier go.”
He left, running for the uninhabited center of the sixth floor as shouts in the singer tongue began to sound behind him.
THE END OF
Part Two
Vyre was unchained.
Moash, the man he’d once been, had lived his entire life chained up and never known it. Oh, he’d recognized the bonds the lighteyes used on him. He’d experienced their tyranny both directly and indirectly—most painfully in the deaths of those he loved, left locked away in their dungeons.
But he hadn’t recognized the truer chains. The ones that bound his soul, constraining him to mere mortality, when he could always have been so much more.
Vyre threw his Shardblade with a wide, overhand throw. Sunlight flashed along the spinning blade as it soared across the quarry and then clanged against a large rock before bouncing free, tearing a gash in the ground, then finally coming to a rest wedged in the stone.
“I … still don’t understand what you’re doing, Vyre,” Khen said to Confusion. Warform suited her. It always had. “That weapon was not meant to be thrown.”
They worked together in the quarry—which had been created by mining through the crem many feet down to reach marble—outside of Kholinar. As usual, his small band of singers went where he did, and started working—quietly—as he did. Moments earlier, Vyre had been cutting stones out with this Blade.
Now, his attention had turned inward. Toward chains, and bindings, and prisons unseen. He gestured, and the distant Shardblade vanished to mist. Yet it took him ten heartbeats to summon it again.
“I saw Prince Adolin throw