The tundra air was white with mist. Through his spyglass as he crouched behind a stunted bush, boots seeping into cold mud, Arin saw the dark line of prisoners emerge from behind rocks at the base of the volcanoes. He scanned each prisoner that passed within view. He couldn’t see her face. The mist was too thick. They filed through the work camp’s open gate. It shut behind them.
He waited for nightfall. The temperature plummeted. A wolf howled in the distance.
Ilyan, the messenger, had warned him about the wolves. He’d shown Arin a way into the tundra that kept them out of sight of the Valorian road to the work camp. They’d slept by day and traveled by night. Ilyan was waiting for Arin where they’d stopped to unload their gear and rest the three horses near a shallow lake. Arin remembered the way Javelin’s head had lifted to see him go.
Arin went quiet inside. He stared at the shut gate. He was filled with a tense, solid stillness, the kind that wouldn’t let him think about anything other than what he needed to do. It stopped the emotions that had claimed him ever since Roshar’s news. It spread like a cold mist over the tarry grief, the elated hope. It kept at bay the feeling that had gutted him, had made it impossible to breathe: remorse.
Another wolf called. It was now as dark as it was going to get.
He left his cover and made for the volcanoes.
* * *
At the base of a volcano, whose top disappeared into the greenish half dark, Arin scrubbed loose sulfur into his hair. He rubbed the yellow, crumbly, stinking stuff into his face, smudging it along the line of his scar. He caked his hands with it. He rubbed it over Roshar’s ring.
Arin’s plain clothes were streaked with mud from days of travel. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen a blur of yellow and brown. A man of uncertain age and origin, unless someone looked closely.
He prayed that no one would. He went down into the mines. His heartbeat seemed to echo in the tunnel like a drum.
He waited for morning.
* * *
At dawn, when the prisoners came down into the tunnel with pickaxes, Arin stepped out of the shadows to mingle with them, become one of them. Furtively, he searched their faces. When he didn’t see her, he grew terrified that he was too late. A month. He hated himself for it. As he went deeper into the mines he couldn’t bear his thoughts: that she was sick, hurt. That she’d been transferred to some other kind of prison. Maybe he was wasting yet more time here while she suffered elsewhere.
He couldn’t let himself think the worst thought.
Kestrel was strong. She could survive this. She could survive anything. But when he saw the slack faces of the other prisoners—their blank stares, their shuffling gait—he wasn’t so sure. Fear slid down his spine.
There were two Valorian guards down in the mines with him, but they paid little attention. They didn’t notice when Arin took a pickax right out of a prisoner’s hands. The guards broke their conversation with each other only when the empty-handed prisoner, wandering like a sleepwalker, tried to dig sulfur out of the rocky walls with his fingers, which bled, nails broken. Out of the corner of his eye, Arin watched the man’s mechanical determination. Arin kept his head down, his shoulders slumped, and his face as blank as the guards neared the prisoner and conferred. Then they shrugged. They found the man a pickax.
Arin worked. He thought of Kestrel doing this. He drove his ax into the wall, swallowed the bile in his throat. He could not get sick, could not draw attention to himself. But the nausea didn’t leave him.
Hours might have gone by like this. He couldn’t count time passing. The grayish light that filtered down from the tunnel’s mouth hadn’t changed.
But the prisoners did. They went suddenly still. Arin snatched his ax back in midswing. He, too, made himself into a statue. He wondered what they were waiting for.
It was water. The guards distributed it. The prisoners’ bodies went taut, and they eagerly drank.
Arin imitated them. He swallowed the water.
Moments later, his pulse shot up to the sky.
* * *
He felt too big for his body. He knew, as if from a distance, that he’d been tampered with. The water.
He struck the rock with an energy resembling delight. This wasn’t right. He told himself that this wasn’t right, that this wasn’t what he really felt. Yet he lovingly filled his double basket with sulfur.
He was going to fail. He’d had a plan, he had come here with a plan … sweat soaked his shirt, the pieces of the plan scattered, and he became certain only of his failure.
Because of you.
Arin’s hands slowed. He heard Kestrel’s voice again, felt the sway of a carriage. Firstwinter. If he put his palm to the carriage window, he’d melt its feathered frost.
Because of you, Kestrel had said. Her mouth had opened beneath his.
The knowledge of what Arin was here to do drove into him and turned like a screw.
He became himself again. He wouldn’t fail her, not again.
* * *
The drug faded. It was still there—it grasshoppered in his blood—but his body was almost quiet now. Tired. His bones felt loose in their sockets. The guards led him to the surface, where other yellow-coated prisoners waited, too many to count at a glance, enough that they could have overwhelmed the guards even without weapons. And they did have weapons. Axes, some of them. Other prisoners could have grabbed the rocks at their feet.
Arin understood obedience. After the Valorian invasion, it had been easy for him to obey. He saw what happened to people who didn’t. He’d been a frightened child. Then he grew and changed, resisted. He got what came next. Blood in the mouth. Elsewhere. Sometimes it felt like it was everywhere, in his eyes, too, changing his vision. It coated his thoughts. The taste of things. Once, to prove a point: a horse halter was tightened over his head, an iron bit set between his teeth.
After ten years of slavery, Arin knew obedience in its many forms. The fear of pain, the gritty promise to oneself of vengeance. Hopelessness. A grinding monotony broken just often enough by the strap or fist. The way punishment made his master more his master, and him less himself. He’d been prone to defiance, no matter how stupid it was, because he could insist, at least in that moment, on the integrity of his will: unalterable by anyone. But then pain did alter it. Humiliation did. Obedience became a version of despair.
But he’d never seen the kind of obedience he witnessed when the guards herded the prisoners into a line. They were cows. They weren’t even like people pretending to be animals, which he had seen and had done. There was no question of resistance here on the tundra, no glimmer of hatred.
Arin couldn’t imagine Kestrel obeying like this. He couldn’t imagine her obeying at all.
He strained to see her through the ragged line of prisoners. Was she at the front of the line? Was she so changed that he couldn’t recognize her?
Was she there at all?
A guard reached for Arin’s pickax. Arin’s hands jerked back. He wanted to swing the ax and nail it into the guard’s throat.
The guard peered at him. Arin forced his fingers to relax. He let the ax go.
He lined up like everyone else and was led to the camp.
* * *
He avoided the food and water served in the yard. He was slowly dribbling soup over his bowl’s lip and down into the mud when he saw her. Her back was to him. Her hair was matted. She was so thin that he had to swallow hard. For a moment he believed that he was wrong, that this could not be her. But it was.
She was being led to a cell block with the other women. Look back. Please. She didn’t, and then he was being led in the opposite direction, his heart shaking inside him, yet he had to do what he was told.
Until, that was, the moment he was inside the men’s cell block.
He came up behind the nearest guard, wrenched the Valorian’s head at an awful angle, and snapped his neck.
There were other guards. They came at him. He stung them with Roshar’s ring and they slumped, unconscious, to the ground. Arin found keys on a fallen guard. He locked up the male prisoners. He stuffed as many as he could into as few cells as possible to save time.
* * *
The women’s cell block was quiet. Most of the prisoners were already in their cells: shadows on the ground.
At the end of the hall, a Valorian woman with silver braids saw him. She drew her dagger. Opened her mouth to shout. He rushed at her, dodged the dagger, clamped a hand down on her face, and stung her with the ring. Then the keys were in his grip and Arin was going cell by cell. He called Kestrel’s name in a hoarse whisper. There was no answer. A feeling frothed out of him, an acid mix of dread and hope and desperation.
Then he stopped. He saw her sleeping on the dirt. Again, her back was to him, but he knew the curve of her spine and the spike of her shoulder and the way her ribs rose and fell. He fumbled with the keys.
He kept saying her name. He was begging her to wake up. The same words spilled out of him over and over. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying anymore as he came into her cell and touched her cheek and, when she still didn’t wake, shifted her body up. Her head tipped back. She slept. Some part of Arin warned that he was going to have to slap her, that she must wake up, and then another part recoiled at the thought. He wouldn’t, he never would, he would kill the person who would.
“Kestrel?” He couldn’t even shake her frail shoulders. “Kestrel?”
Her eyes cracked open. He caught his breath. She came awake more fully, and saw him.
He hadn’t allowed himself, before, to consider the possibility that she’d be like the other prisoners, that her mind would be gone, that there’d be no life in her eyes and her face would be drained of everything that made her who she was.
She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t, and as Arin watched her blink and take him in, and saw the mind behind her gaze, he was grateful. The gratitude came hot and flowing: a prayer of thanks to his gods. He cupped her face between his hands—too rough.
Or he believed he must have been too rough, because she recoiled. He was afraid he’d hurt her. But she narrowed her eyes in the wan light, studying him. He saw her confusion, couldn’t translate it.
She whispered, “Who are you?”
Arin didn’t understand until she asked her question again.
Understanding arrowed into him.
She had no memory of him. She truly had no idea who he was.