This wasn’t the homecoming he’d imagined during his first months at war. A glorious reunion where he returned as a hero wearing the knots of a sergeant, his brother delivered safe to his family. In his fancies, people had praised him, slapped him on the back and accepted him.
Idiocy. These people had never treated him or his family with any measure of kindness.
“Let’s go,” the soldier said, shoving him on the shoulder.
Kaladin didn’t move. When the man shoved harder, Kaladin rolled his body with the push, and the shift of weight sent the guard stumbling past him. The man turned, angry. Kaladin met his gaze. The guard hesitated, then took a step back and gripped his mace more firmly.
“Wow,” Syl said, zipping up to Kaladin’s shoulder. “That is quite the glare you gave.”
“Old sergeant’s trick,” Kaladin whispered, turning and leaving the kitchens. The guard followed behind, barking an order that Kaladin ignored.
Each step through this manor was like walking through a memory. There was the dining nook where he’d confronted Rillir and Laral on the night he’d discovered his father was a thief. This hallway beyond, hung with portraits of people he didn’t know, had been where he’d played as a child. Roshone hadn’t changed the portraits.
He’d have to talk to his parents about Tien. It was why he hadn’t tried to contact them after being freed from slavery. Could he face them? Storms, he hoped they lived. But could he face them?
He heard a moan. Soft, underneath the sounds of people talking, still he picked it out.
“There were wounded?” he asked, turning on his guard.
“Yeah,” the man said. “But—”
Kaladin ignored him and strode down the hallway, Syl flying along beside his head. Kaladin shoved past people, following the sounds of the tormented, and eventually stumbled into the doorway of the parlor. It had been transformed into a surgeon’s triage room, with mats laid out on the floor bearing wounded.
A figure knelt by one of the pallets carefully splinting a broken arm. Kaladin had known as soon as he’d heard those moans of pain where he’d find his father.
Lirin glanced at him. Storms. Kaladin’s father looked weathered, bags underneath his dark brown eyes. The hair was greyer than Kaladin remembered, the face gaunter. But he was the same. Balding, diminutive, thin, bespectacled … and amazing.
“What’s this?” Lirin asked, turning back to his work. “Did the highprince’s house send soldiers already? That was faster than expected. How many did you bring? We can certainly use…” Lirin hesitated, then looked back at Kaladin.
Then his eyes opened wide.
“Hello, Father,” Kaladin said.
The guardsman finally caught up, shouldering past gawking townspeople and waving his mace toward Kaladin like a baton. Kaladin sidestepped absently, then pushed the man so he stumbled farther down the hallway.
“It is you,” Lirin said. Then he scrambled over and caught Kaladin in an embrace. “Oh, Kal. My boy. My little boy. Hesina! HESINA!”
Kaladin’s mother appeared in the doorway a moment later, bearing a tray of freshly boiled bandages. She probably thought that Lirin needed her help with a patient. Taller than her husband by a few fingers, she wore her hair tied back with a kerchief just as Kaladin remembered.
She raised her gloved safehand to her lips, gaping, and the tray slipped down in her other hand, tumbling bandages to the floor. Shockspren, like pale yellow triangles breaking and re-forming, appeared behind her. She dropped the tray and reached to the side of Kaladin’s face with a soft touch. Syl zipped around in a ribbon of light, laughing.
Kaladin couldn’t laugh. Not until it had been said. He took a deep breath, choked on it the first time, then finally forced it out.
“I’m sorry, Father, Mother,” he whispered. “I joined the army to protect him, but I could barely protect myself.” He found himself shaking, and he put his back to the wall, letting himself sink down until he was seated. “I let Tien die. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.…”
“Oh, Kaladin,” Hesina said, kneeling down beside him and pulling him into an embrace. “We got your letter, but over a year ago they told us you had died as well.”
“I should have saved him,” Kaladin whispered.
“You shouldn’t have gone in the first place,” Lirin said. “But now … Almighty, now you’re back.” Lirin stood up, tears leaking down his cheeks. “My son! My son is alive!”
* * *
A short time later, Kaladin sat among the wounded, holding a cup of warm soup in his hands. He hadn’t had a hot meal since … when?
“That’s obviously a slave’s brand, Lirin,” a soldier said, speaking with Kaladin’s father near the doorway into the room. “Sas glyph, so it happened here in the princedom. They probably told you he’d died to save you the shame of the truth. And then the shash brand—you don’t get that for mere insubordination.”
Kaladin sipped his soup. His mother knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder, protective. The soup tasted of home. Boiled vegetable broth with steamed lavis stirred in, spiced as his mother always made it.
He hadn’t spoken much in the half hour since he’d arrived. For now, he just wanted to be here with them.
Strangely, his memories had turned fond. He remembered Tien laughing, brightening the dreariest of days. He remembered hours spent studying medicine with his father, or cleaning with his mother.
Syl hovered before his mother, still wearing her little havah, invisible to everyone but Kaladin. The spren had a perplexed look on her face.
“The wrong-way highstorm did break many of the town’s buildings,” Hesina explained to him softly. “But our home still stands. We had to dedicate your spot to something else, Kal, but we can make space for you.”
Kaladin glanced at the soldier. Captain of Roshone’s guard; Kaladin thought he remembered the man. He almost seemed too pretty to be a soldier, but then, he was lighteyed.
“Don’t worry about that,” Hesina said. “We’ll deal with it, whatever the … trouble is. With all these wounded pouring in from the villages around, Roshone will need your father’s skill. Roshone won’t go making a storm and risk Lirin’s discontent—and you won’t be taken from us again.”
She talked to him as if he were a child.
What a surreal sensation, being back here, being treated like he was still the boy who had left for war five years ago. Three men bearing their son’s name had lived and died in that time. The soldier who had been forged in Amaram’s army. The slave, so bitter and angry. His parents had never met Captain Kaladin, bodyguard to the most powerful man in Roshar.
And then … there was the next man, the man he was becoming. A man who owned the skies and spoke ancient oaths. Five years had passed. And four lifetimes.
“He’s a runaway slave,” the guard captain hissed. “We can’t just ignore that, surgeon. He probably stole the uniform. And even if for some reason he was allowed to hold a spear despite his brands, he’s a deserter. Look at those haunted eyes and tell me you don’t see a man who has done terrible things.”
“He’s my son,” Lirin said. “I’ll buy his writ of slavery. You’re not taking him. Tell Roshone he can either let this slide, or he can go without a surgeon. Unless he assumes Mara can take over after just a few years of apprenticeship.”