He could hear two women, unseen but chatting a short distance way.
“You know that he stole from the old citylord,” one woman’s voice said, keeping her voice down. “An entire goblet full of spheres. The surgeon says they were a gift, but he was the only one there when the citylord died.”
“There is a document, I hear,” the first voice said.
“A few glyphs. Not a proper will. And whose hand wrote those glyphs? The surgeon himself. It ain’t right, the citylord not having a woman there to be scribe. I’m telling you. It ain’t right what they do.”
Kal gritted his teeth, tempted to step out and let the women see that he’d heard them. His father wouldn’t approve, though. Lirin wouldn’t want to cause strife or embarrassment.
But that was his father. So Kal marched right out of the alleyway, passing Nanha Terith and Nanha Relina standing and gossiping in front of the bakery. Terith was the baker’s wife, a fat woman with curly dark hair. She was in the middle of another calumny. Kal gave her a sharp look, and her brown eyes showed a satisfying moment of discomfiture.
Kal crossed the square carefully, wary of patches of ice. The door to the bakery slammed shut behind him, the two women fleeing inside.
His satisfaction didn’t last long. Why did people always say such things about his father? They called him morbid and unnatural, but would scurry out to buy glyphwards and charms from a passing apothecary or luck-merch. The Almighty pity a man who actually did something useful to help!
Still stewing, Kal turned a few corners, walking to where his mother stood on a stepladder at the side of the town hall, carefully chipping at the eaves of the building. Hesina was a tall woman, and she usually kept her hair pulled back into a tail, then wrapped a kerchief around her head. Today, she wore a knit hat over that. She had a long brown coat that matched Kal’s, and the blue hem of her skirt just barely peeked out at the bottom.
The objects of her attention were a set of icicle-like pendants of rock that had formed on the edges of the roof. Highstorms dropped stormwater, and stormwater carried crem. If left alone, crem eventually hardened into stone. Buildings grew stalactites, formed by stormwater slowly dripping from the eaves. You had to clean them off regularly, or risk weighing down the roof so much that it collapsed.
She noticed him and smiled, her cheeks flushed from the cold. With a narrow face, a bold chin, and full lips, she was a pretty woman. At least Kal thought so. Prettier than the baker’s wife, for sure.
“Your father dismissed you from your lessons already?” she asked.
“Everyone hates Father,” Kal blurted out.
His mother turned back to her work. “Kaladin, you’re thirteen. You’re old enough to know not to say foolish things like that.”
“It’s true,” he said stubbornly. “I heard some women talking, just now. They said that Father stole the spheres from Brightlord Wistiow. They say that Father enjoys slicing people open and doing things that ain’t natural.”
“Aren’t natural.”
“Why can’t I speak like everyone else?”
“Because it isn’t proper.”
“It’s proper enough for Nanha Terith.”
“And what do you think of her?”
Kal hesitated. “She’s ignorant. And she likes to gossip about things she doesn’t know anything about.”
“Well, then. If you wish to emulate her, I can obviously find no objection to the practice.”
Kal grimaced. You had to watch yourself when speaking with Hesina; she liked to twist words about. He leaned back against the wall of the town hall, watching his breath puff out in front of him. Perhaps a different tactic would work. “Mother, why do people hate Father?”
“They don’t hate him,” she said. However, his calmly asked question got her to continue. “But he does make them uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Because some people are frightened of knowledge. Your father is a learned man; he knows things the others can’t understand. So those things must be dark and mysterious.”
“They aren’t afraid of luckmerches and glyphwards.”
“Those you can understand,” his mother said calmly. “You burn a glyphward out in front of your house, and it will turn away evil. It’s easy. Your father won’t give someone a ward to heal them. He’ll insist that they stay in bed, drinking water, taking some foul medicine, and washing their wound each day. It’s hard. They’d rather leave it all to fate.”
Kal considered that. “I think they hate him because he fails too often.”
“There is that. If a glyphward fails, you can blame it on the will of the Almighty. If your father fails, then it’s his fault. Or such is the perception.” His mother continued working, flakes of stone falling to the ground around her. “They’ll never actually hate your father – he’s too useful. But he’ll never really be one of them. That’s the price of being a surgeon. Having power over the lives of men is an uncomfortable responsibility.”
“And if I don’t want that responsibility? What if I just want to be something normal, like a baker, or a farmer, or…” Or a soldier, he added in his mind. He’d picked up a staff a few times in secret, and though he’d never been able to replicate that moment when he’d fought Jost, there was something invigorating about holding a weapon. Something that drew him and excited him.
“I think,” his mother said, “that you’ll find the lives of bakers and farmers are not so enviable.”
“At least they have friends.”
“And so do you. What of Tien?”
“Tien’s not my friend, Mother. He’s my brother.”
“Oh, and he can’t be both at once?”
Kal rolled his eyes. “You know what I mean.”
She climbed down from the stepladder, patting his shoulder. “Yes, I do, and I’m sorry to make light of it. But you put yourself in a difficult position. You want friends, but do you really want to act like the other boys? Give up your studies so you can slave in the fields? Grow old before your time, weathered and furrowed by the sun?”
Kal didn’t reply.
“The things that others have always seem better than what you have,” his mother said. “Bring the stepladder.”
Kal followed dutifully, rounding the town hall to the other side, then putting down the ladder so his mother could climb up to begin work again.
“The others think Father stole those spheres.” Kal shoved his hands in his pockets. “They think he wrote out that order from Brightlord Wistiow and had the old man sign it when he didn’t know what he was doing.”
His mother was silent.
“I hate their lies and gossip,” Kal said. “I hate them for making up things about us.”
“Don’t hate them, Kal. They’re good people. In this case, they’re just repeating what they’ve heard.” She glanced at the citylord’s manor, distant upon a hill above the town. Every time Kal saw it, he felt like he should go up and talk to Laral. But the last few times he’d tried, he hadn’t been allowed to see her. Now that her father was dead, her nurse oversaw her time, and the woman didn’t think mingling with boys from the town was appropriate.
The nurse’s husband, Miliv, had been Brightlord Wistiow’s head steward. If there was a source of bad rumors about Kal’s family, it probably came from him. He never had liked Kal’s father. Well, Miliv wouldn’t matter soon. A new citylord was expected to arrive any day.
“Mother,” Kal said, “those spheres are just sitting there doing nothing but glowing. Can’t we spend some to keep you from having to come out here and work?”