said, moving to get more stalks of knobweed. “Maybe I should practice Soulcasting instead.”
Pattern buzzed. “Dangerous.”
“So Jasnah told me,” Shallan said. “But I don’t have her to teach me anymore, and so far as I know, she’s the only one who could have done so. It’s either practice on my own or never learn to use the ability.” She squeezed out another few drops of knobweed sap, moved to massage it into a cut on her foot, then stopped. The wound was noticeably smaller than it had been just moments ago.
“The Stormlight is healing me,” Shallan said.
“It makes you unbreak?”
“Yes. Stormfather! I’m doing things almost by accident.”
“Can something be ‘almost’ an accident?” Pattern asked, genuinely curious. “This phrase, I do not know what it means.”
“I . . . Well, it’s mostly a figure of speech.” Then, before he could ask further, she continued, “And by that I mean something we say to convey an idea or a feeling, but not a literal fact.”
Pattern buzzed.
“What does that mean?” Shallan asked, massaging the knobweed in anyway. “When you buzz like that. What are you feeling?”
“Hmmm . . . Excited. Yes. It has been so long since anyone has learned of you and your kind.”
Shallan squeezed some more sap onto her toes. “You came to learn? Wait . . . you’re a scholar?”
“Of course. Hmmm. Why else would I come? I will learn so much before—”
He stopped abruptly.
“Pattern?” she asked. “Before what?”
“A figure of speech.” He said it perfectly flatly, absent of tone. He was growing better and better at speaking like a person, and at times he sounded just like one. But now all of the color had gone from his voice.
“You’re lying,” she accused him, glancing at his pattern on the wall. He had shrunk, growing as small as a fist, half his usual size.
“Yes,” he said reluctantly.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Shallan said, surprised at the realization.
“Yes.”
“But you love lies!”
“So fascinating,” he said. “You are all so fascinating.”
“Tell me what you were going to say,” Shallan ordered. “Before you stopped yourself. I’ll know if you lie.”
“Hmmmm. You sound like her. More and more like her.”
“Tell me.”
He buzzed with an annoyed sound, quick and high pitched. “I will learn what I can of you before you kill me.”
“You think . . . You think I’m going to kill you?”
“It happened to the others,” Pattern said, his voice softer now. “It will happen to me. It is . . . a pattern.”
“This has to do with the Knights Radiant,” Shallan said, raising her hands to start braiding her hair. That would be better than leaving it wild—though without a comb and brush, even braiding it was hard. Storms, she thought, I need a bath. And soap. And a dozen other things.
“Yes,” Pattern said. “The knights killed their spren.”
“How? Why?”
“Their oaths,” Pattern said. “It is all I know. My kind, those who were unbonded, we retreated, and many kept our minds. Even still, it is hard to think apart from my kind, unless . . .”
“Unless?”
“Unless we have a person.”
“So that’s what you get out of it,” Shallan said, untangling her hair with her fingers. “Symbiosis. I get access to Surgebinding, you get thought.”
“Sapience,” Pattern said. “Thought. Life. These are of humans. We are ideas. Ideas that wish to live.”
Shallan continued working on her hair. “I’m not going to kill you,” she said firmly. “I won’t do it.”
“I don’t suppose the others intended to either,” he said. “But it is no matter.”
“It is an important matter,” Shallan said. “I won’t do it. I’m not one of the Knights Radiant. Jasnah made that clear. A man who can use a sword isn’t necessarily a soldier. Just because I can do what I do doesn’t make me one of them.”
“You spoke oaths.”
Shallan froze.
Life before death . . . The words drifted toward her from the shadows of her past. A past she would not think of.
“You live lies,” Pattern said. “It gives you strength. But the truth . . . Without speaking truths you will not be able to grow, Shallan. I know this somehow.”
She finished with her hair and moved to rewrap her feet. Pattern had moved to the other side of the rattling wagon chamber, settling onto the wall, only faintly visible in the dim light. She had a handful of infused spheres left. Not much Stormlight, considering how quickly that other had left her. Should she use what she had to further heal her feet? Could she even do that intentionally, or would