gained speed, coat flapping, hair whipping behind him. Air buffeted his face, and he narrowed his eyes, but did not close them.
Beneath, dark chasms passed one after another. Plateau. Pit. Plateau. Pit. This sensation . . . flying over the land . . . he had felt this before, in dreams. What took bridgemen hours to cross, he passed in minutes. He felt as if something were boosting him from behind, the wind itself carrying him. Syl zipped along to his right.
And to his left? No, those were other windspren. He’d accumulated dozens of them, flying around him as ribbons of light. He could pick out Syl. He didn’t know how; she didn’t look different, but he could tell. Like you could pick a family member out of a crowd just by their walk.
Syl and her cousins twisted around him in a spiral of light, free and loose, but with a hint of coordination.
How long had it been since he felt this good, this triumphant, this alive? Not since before Tien’s death. Even after saving Bridge Four, darkness had shadowed him.
That evaporated. He saw a spire of rock ahead on the plateaus, and nudged himself toward it with a careful Lashing to the right. Other Lashings to his rear slowed his fall enough that when he hit the tip of the spire of rock, he could clutch to it and spin around it, fingers on the smooth cremstone.
A hundred windspren broke around him, like the crash of a wave, spraying outward from Kaladin in a fan of light.
He grinned. Then he looked upward, toward the sky.
* * *
Highlord Amaram continued to stare at the Shardblade in the night. He held it up before him in the light spilling from the front of the manor house.
Shallan remembered her father’s quiet terror as he looked upon that weapon, leveled toward him. Could it be a coincidence? Two weapons that looked the same? Perhaps her memory was flawed.
No. No, she would never forget the look of that Blade. It was the one Helaran had held. And no two Blades were the same.
“Brightlord,” Shallan said, drawing Amaram’s attention. He seemed startled, as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“Yes?”
“Brightness Shallan,” she said, “wants to make certain the records are all correct and that the histories of the Blades and Plate in the Alethi army have been properly traced. Your Blade is not in them. She asked if you would mind sharing the origin of your Blade, in the name of scholarship.”
“I’ve explained this to Dalinar already,” Amaram said. “I don’t know the history of my Shards. Both were in the possession of an assassin who tried to kill me. A younger man. Veden, with red hair. We don’t know his name, and his face was ruined in my counterattack. I had to stab him through his faceplate, you see.”
Young man. Red hair.
She stood before her brother’s killer.
“I . . .” Shallan stammered, feeling sick. “Thank you. I will pass the information along.”
She turned, trying not to stumble as she walked away. She finally knew what had happened to Helaran.
You were involved in all of this, weren’t you, Helaran? she thought. Just like Father was. But how, why?
It seemed that Amaram was trying to bring back the Voidbringers. Helaran had tried to kill him.
But would anyone really want to bring back the Voidbringers? Perhaps she was mistaken. She needed to get to her rooms, draw those maps from the Memories she’d taken, and try to figure this all out.
The guards, blessedly, did not give her any further troubles as she slipped away from Amaram’s camp and into the anonymity of the darkness. That was well, for if they’d looked closely, they’d have seen the messenger boy with tears in his eyes. Crying for a brother that now, once and for all, Shallan knew was dead.
* * *
Upward.
One Lashing, then another, then a third. Kaladin shot up into the sky. Nothing but open expanse, an infinite sea for his delight.
The air grew cold. Still upward he went, reaching for the clouds. Finally, worried about running out of Stormlight before returning to the ground—he had only one infused sphere left, carried in his pocket for an emergency—Kaladin reluctantly Lashed himself downward.
He didn’t fall downward immediately; his momentum upward merely slowed. He was still Lashed to the sky; he hadn’t dismissed the upward Lashings.
Curious, he Lashed himself downward to slow further, then dismissed all of his Lashings except one up and one down. He eventually came to a stop