Chapter Text
Adolin had his words read to him by his cousin Jasnah when he was eighteen. He’d had them for two years by then, but he never cared to learn what they said. His mother was dead, and it didn’t seem right to share something this intimate with an ardent, someone his father owned. So much already of what Adolin was belonged to his family—his name, his future, the princedom. The words were Adolin’s and nobody else’s.
Then the king was killed and Adolin realised that he too, could die at any moment. Not that he would anytime soon; the campaign on the Shattered Plans was planned with care, and he had his father’s Honour Guards and his mother’s Plate. His soulmate though, wouldn’t have any of that. They were just as mortal as Adolin was, and he might never get to meet them. If he had to go his entire life without ever hearing those words spoken, and get married and fight and die without feeling them burn on his skin, he wanted to know.
“I can write it out in glyphs if you want,” Jasnah offered, sounding uncharacteristically sympathetic. Not that she was usually rude or anything—not to Adolin, at least—just… never this tactful. He wondered if she had seen a soulmark before, if she’d studied them. They weren’t an exact science, in Adolin’s limited understanding, but Jasnah seemed able to make a science of anything, so who knew?
He asked. Jasnah shook her head.
“There isn’t much on records about soulmates.” She seemed rightfully disappointed at such poor recordkeeping. “All I know is what every darkeyed child in Alethkar is told before bedtime, that the words burn when they’re first spoken and will never fade. All this secrecy around it is so annoying,” she said, spitting out the word as if personally offended. She probably was.
“Because of the Church?” Adolin asked, amused. The Church seemed to be the cause of most of Jasnah’s complains, and if she got started she could go on criticizing Vorinism for hours. As a youngling, he’d thought it funny to encourage this tendency of Jasnah’s whenever he got the opportunity if only to see Aunt Navani hide a bored scowl behind her covered safehand.
“The Church,” Jasnah said. “And Alethi propriety. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to gather proper data about the frequency and resolution of soulmarks when everyone just refuses to speak about it. That’s not exactly conducive to scholarship, Adolin.”
Resolution of soulmarks—well, that certainly wouldn’t happen to him anytime soon. Still, he knew what his words were now. Even if Adolin would never get to hear them spoken out loud, he knew.
As the years went by, the days trickling by out in the Plans, Adolin managed to almost completely forget about his soulmark. It was just another small part of him, like his nails and the silvery scar on his forearm, something he never spoke of. He never even told Renarin that he had a soulmark; it seemed such a meaningless detail in his life of plateau runs and winehouses and duelling sands, like it belonged to a completely different world. And he certainly hadn’t been expecting that he would meet his match in the middle of a warcamp—or that it would be a bridgeman of all people, defiance clear in his dark brown eyes.
He’d been making his way through Sadeas’s camp when he heard a woman’s scream, followed by loud curses, a low whimper. Adolin pushed through the crowd—all of them walking quickly, no one seemingly caring that someone may be hurt. It was just the sort of thing one could expect to happen in Sadeas’s warcamp, Adolin thought. He couldn’t wait for the day his father finally came to his senses and stopped trying to mend a friendship that had died with Gavilar.
There was a woman lying on the ground on one side of the roadway, a man standing at full height in front of her. An officer, Adolin noticed, feeling his blood boil.
“Follow me,” he told his guards, walking up to where the woman lay on the pavement. He put his hand on the hilt of his sword, holding back a sneer as he looked Sadeas’s officer up and down. His coat was still unbuttoned, hair a dishevelled mess.
With the corner of his eye, he could see other soldier approaching, all of them wearing Sadeas’s colours. That fellow’s friends, or just bystanders? It didn’t matter—given the chance, every man in Sadeas’s army would gladly take the opportunity to start a brawl with someone wearing Kholin blue.
The man followed Adolin’s gaze and started to button up his coat on the side, smiling at him with forced cordiality. “You don’t belong here, friends,” he said. Adolin could still hear the woman crying, whimpering softly. She sounded like she had been hurt. “It seems you wandered into the wrong warcamp.”
“We have legitimate business.” Adolin held out his hand. If Dalinar could make nice with the other Highprinces, even Ruthar, he could manage this. “Come now, whatever your problem with this woman, I’m sure it can be resolved without anger or violence.”
The man snorted. “She’s a whore.”
Oh, so now the fellow had a problem with it. “I can see that.” He left his hand where it was.
The man sneered again and spat on Adolin’s open palm. He wished nothing more than to punch him in the face with it, but he held himself back. They were surrounded, and it wouldn’t be fair to drag his guards into a useless fistfight. Adolin sighed to himself, summoning his Blade.
“I see.” He smiled as the Blade formed in his hand, watching the cockiness in the officer’s eyes give way to fear. His face turned pale and he swore, shooting Adolin a venomous look. He turned on his back and fled, leaving them alone with the woman.
Or – not alone. As Adolin helped the woman get back to her feet, trying his best not to stare at her ungloved safehand, he became aware of someone watching them. A young man, wearing the vest and trousers of Sadeas’s unfortunate bridgemen. He was staring at the scene in front of him with a frown in his mouth that was hard for Adolin to read. It was not awe at the sight of his Shardblade, as it often happened—he’d thrust his Blade into the stone pavement to discourage any further troubles, but the boy barely looked at it. Curious. He seemed far more focused on the woman’s half-naked body, and on Adolin himself.
“Thank you, Brightlord,” the prostitute said. “Perhaps I could interest you? There would be no charge.”
Adolin considered it. Of course he did. But the thought of what would happen once his father heard of this—because he would hear of it, first thing from Niter in his daily report—was enough to give him an headache. “Tempting,” he said, politely, “but my father would kill me. He has this thing about the old ways.”
“A pity,” the woman said, trying to fit her safehand into the sleeve of her ripped dress. “Your father is quite prudish, then?”
Storms, if only that were the issue. “You might say that,” he said.
He turned his head, towards the bridgeman. He was still staring.
“Ho, bridgeboy,” he called out. The bridgeman winced, looking at Adolin like he’d slapped him.
What? Adolin thought, annoyed. Was he that intimidating? He searched around in his pouch for a sphere, something for his trouble. “Run and give word to Brightlord Reral Makoram.”
He threw the sphere in the bridgeman’s direction, but he made no move to catch it. It fell to the pavement and rolled until it hit the man’s foot. Only then the bridgeman seemed to shake from his stupor—he bent down to pick up the sphere, and looked from it to Adolin and then again to his hand, shaking his head to himself. Confusionspren was hovering around his head like a cloud.
“He’s in the Sixth Battalion,” Adolin said. “Tell him—”
The bridgeman laughed, a low and bitter laugh. “Go tell him yourself,” he said, and then two things happened. Adolin recognized the words—the ones he’d been hoping to hear, never expecting he would, for close to a third of his life—just as he felt the soulmark burn hot against his skin.
“You…” Adolin said, but the man turned and left, breaking into a stride that was almost a run.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait.” But it was of no use. He could have tried chasing the man but he didn’t know the camp and didn’t want to draw any more attention to the encounter than he already had. He brought one hand up to trail through his hair, feeling self-conscious, and threw a look at his guards.
“That was odd,” he said. His eyes found the woman. “Allow me to escort out of here,” he told her. “I think you’ll find Highprince Sebarial’s camp much more to your liking.”
Inside, though, he was trembling. He felt the rush of blood in his ears, the grip of nervous excitement in his stomach. He’d met his match. He had a match and he had met him, they had spoken. Adolin had a match, and they’d talked and—Storms, he thought. A bridgeman, a darkeyed bridgeman. A slave, even, or perhaps a criminal—what other sort of man would end up in Sadeas’s bridge crews? Someone so completely unsuitable, unfitting for Adolin to even acknowledge, not to mention… all the other things that might come from a soulmate bond. A darkeyed man who’d heard Adolin’s words and ran away, making it clear he wasn’t even interested in trying to—anything.
Perhaps the bridgeman had the right of it, he thought. Maybe there was just nothing to be done.
He went back to his own warcamp with a bitter taste in his mouth.
Kaladin didn’t get very far. He half-walked, half-run until he found himself in a narrow alley between buildings with nobody in sight and let himself fall to the pavement, breathing heavily. His head was spinning, dark spots dancing over his eyes. High heart rate, he thought he’d heard, a detached voice that reminded him of Lirin. Regulate your breathing. Long and slow. In and out.
Lirin and Hesina had been soulmates. Kaladin had grown up seeing a twirl of black ink around his mother’s wrist that read, You’re going the wrong way, miss, and he’d laid his eyes on Hesina’s mark so many times that he had to stop himself from picking apart the words in Lirin’s medical books, searching for those familiar characters among the flow of text. His father’s mark was scribbled over his right knee in Hesina’s practised hand and Kaladin had only seen it on rare occasions, though he knew the words by heart.
His parents had never made a mystery of their shared Mark, and when Kaladin had gotten his own they’d been overjoyed. They had a special dinner, as if it were his birthday, everyone dressed up in their feast clothes. It was one of the last happy memories Kaladin had of home.
“Kaladin,” Syl called, fluttering somewhere above his left eye. She looked agitated. “What was that? I’ve never—I feel like I should know what happened.”
“That…” Kaladin swallowed. Somehow saying it out loud felt scarier than facing down Parshendi archers on a bridge run. He closed his shaking hands into firsts.
“He said my words.”
Syl paused, then straighten up. Her dress was hanging limply over her miniature body, hair falling over her face. She inclined her head. “And what does it mean?”
When Kaladin’s soulmark had appeared, a few months into his fourteenth year, Tien had been delighted. A mark was the best thing, his brother had said, something unique and special. He couldn’t wait until he was old enough to get a soulmark of his own, and by the time they’d entered Amaram’s army, he’d still been hoping.
Hesina had hugged him tightly and told Kaladin that soulmarks were a gift from the Almighty. She laughed after she’d read the words to him, and Kaladin had bristled, scratching at the mark. Bridgeboy, he’d muttered to himself, mouth shaping the word over and over. What a silly word, he’d thought then. Now he clawed at his skin, burning with humiliation. Bridgeboy, the word mocked him, sullying the tender skin on the inside of his arm.
Just another scar, Kaladin thought, just like the brand on his forehead Amaram had given him. In those dark months of slavery, he’d tried so hard to forget all that’d come before—that he’d ever had friends, a brother, people who cared – and put all thoughts of his soulmark out of his head. Now Kaladin told himself that he should have remembered, should’ve realized when he’d first seen the bridges. Bridgeboy. Another scar, another reminder of his slavery. Even if by some miracle he could find a way to escape, he would never leave Bridge Four behind.
Back home in Hearthstone, Hesina once told him that soulmarks meant that there was someone out there in the world who was made just for you. “And you may not like your Match at first Kal,” she’d said. “They could be rude or odd or just not look like you expected, but they’re yours. Finding your Match will teach you things you never realized about yourself, things you’ll like and thinks you won’t. And you’ll be glad for it, so glad.”
His mother’s voice was soft in his memory, and it gave him no comfort. Kaladin’s Match wasn’t someone made for him—it was a lighteye, some noble fop with more spheres than common sense. What could someone like that have in common with him?
A Shardbearer, an intrusive voice whispered in his mind, chilling him to the bone. A Shardbearer had been meant for him, a warrior who could burn a man’s life away with a single touch, like the man Kaladin had killed a lifetime ago. What Kaladin himself could have been before he became a slave instead.
What if, Kaladin found himself thinking, horrified, what if he’d been meant to take the Blade, then. Maybe this was what his soulmark meant—his Match was a Shardbearer like Kaladin should have been. Perhaps his own foolish honour had gotten in the way of his destiny, sabotaged his whole life. His words had burned when the man had spoken them, burned just like the branding iron. Maybe he’d ruined everything twice over.
But, Kaladin thought. His mark. Bridgeboy. It didn’t sound like something a Brightlord would say to a peer, had Kaladin took the shard and became one of them. Maybe he’d been meant to refuse the Blade all along.
“Kaladin,” Syl called again. “What does it mean?”
He sighed. “I don’t know.”
Maybe, he decided, destiny didn’t exist at all and words were just that. Words. Maybe soulmarks were just some kind of spren, like Syl—well, not exactly like Syl, he thought to himself—and there was nothing mystical there, no hidden purpose or divine gift.
Besides, Kaladin thought, even if he’d taken the Blade, did he truly want to become like that man? Some idle noble with buttons made of gemstones, who pranced around walking down the street as he owned it… Kaladin shook his head to himself, trying to push thoughts of the blond man out of his mind.
He had a bridge crew to go back to.