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Princess Sarene of Teod steps off her ship in the harbour of Kae and is informed almost immediately, by King Iadon's court attendant Ketol, that the fiancé she has crossed the Sea of Fjorden to marry has died of an unexpected disease during her five-day voyage. Ketol delivers the news with the same dull, uninterested tone he uses to bark at the packmen unloading her luggage; he is the only reception the king has thought to send. Her seon Ashe — a melon-sized ball of light hovering at her shoulder — quotes the relevant clause of the fifty-page wedding contract from memory: if either partner is called home to Merciful Domi before the ceremony, the engagement is considered marriage in all legal and social respects. On the same morning she has stepped off her ship, Sarene has therefore become a princess of Arelon and the widow of a man she never met. Her first instinct is wry — her father will laugh himself sick when he hears — but the second is suspicion: not even an envoy from the king, much less the king himself, has come to meet her.

She insists on diverting to the funeral tent before being presented at court. The tent is more crowded than she expected; according to Ashe's briefings the dead prince was the most popular public figure in the country, and the grief on the faces around the central casket reads as the real thing. The casket itself is carved with Aons of hope and peace in the Korathi style and surrounded by a ring of lavish offering-foods. She asks one of the small, kindly priests if she may see the body and is gently refused; the prince's disease, she is told, was disfiguring, and the king has asked that he be allowed his dignity in death. Standing in front of the closed casket she finds herself oddly angry rather than sorrowful, and looking around the tent she registers what is bothering her: it all feels too sterile, too well arranged, for a man of Raoden's reported vigour to be dead of the coughing shivers on the eve of a political wedding. Ashe reminds her she has a suspicious nature; she does not deny it.

The carriage carries her on toward the palace and she leans on the window watching Kae roll past, fighting an undertow of loneliness. She is twenty-five, lanky, brusque, well past the age at which she should have been married, and the prince she has been writing to for months — and quietly, despite herself, beginning to love through his letters — was her last reasonable prospect. She steers herself away from self-pity by cataloguing the city instead. The thoroughfares are wide and well kept, the people on the streets well dressed, the mansions of the aristocracy gaudy in every imported style — Duladen wings and pointed roofs here, Fjordell stone fortresses there — without a single beggar visible from her window. None of it looks like the economically broken kingdom the diplomatic reports describe. One image stays with her in passing: a small procession of blue-robed Korathi priests leading a single white-robed figure quietly through the crowd, vanishing around a corner before she can ask what it is. Above the lavish rooftops, the walls of Elantris loom black and inescapable, a shadow against which all the gaudiness reads as denial.

She and Ashe talk through the broader picture as the carriage rolls. The bay at the mouth of the Aredel is the finest harbour on the north coast and probably explains why Iadon kept his court so close to the cursed city; the Shaod does not appear to be contagious, so proximity costs him nothing politically. The treaty she has come to seal is the only thing standing between Teod and the rising tide of Fjorden under Wyrn, whose religious empire has been swallowing kingdom after kingdom since the collapse of the Duladen Republic. The contract binds her to Arelon only so long as she remains in the country and remains faithful to her dead husband; the alliance holds with her here. So she will stay.

In the throne room she is kept waiting fifteen minutes at the back of the chamber before Iadon deigns to notice her. She uses the time to study him — a thin, shrewd man, decisive with his administrators, stabbing his fingers at a table map and giving direct orders — and concludes he is a man of strong personality with whom she might, with patience, be able to work. Then he waves her over, interrupts her halfway through her curtsy to complain that no one warned him she would be so tall, and observes that "the only one who would have cared about that isn't around to see it." He snaps for Eshen — his queen, a slight woman of brownish-blonde Aonic hair who jumps at the summons from the far side of the room — and orders her to take "this one" to her rooms and find her some embroidery or whatever else it is that entertains women. The audience is over before Sarene has finished standing up. Years of training keep her face still; her dignity is less composed than her face.

Queen Eshen turns out to be a kindly, miniature flutter of a woman who cannot stay on one topic for more than a sentence. She walks Sarene to her new rooms through a meandering monologue that touches on roses, the size of windows, the colour orange, the inferiority of yellow, the gardens, the king's stables, Duladel in season, and the failings of Fjordell cooking, without ever landing long enough on any of them for Sarene to seize a thread. Set out on the bed is a small stack of new dresses, all of them black — for the burial that evening, Eshen explains, fumbling around the word — and a wardrobe of every other colour she could imagine, except, as the queen apologises, more yellow than was strictly necessary. What Sarene notices most is what the queen never says. Through the whole tour, Eshen never once mentions the stepson who has just died.

Once alone, Sarene tries on the black dress in the mirror — too pale for her, but for once long enough — and asks Ashe what he has found. The seon reports that there are far fewer seons in Kae than there used to be, and that those he has found are unwilling to talk about how the prince died — they consider it deeply ill-omened that a prince should die so close to his wedding. Sarene says aloud, for the first time, what she has been circling around all morning: she thinks someone may have killed the prince. Ashe points out, reasonably, that Queen Eshen was not Raoden's mother — Iadon's first wife died a dozen years ago, and he remarried shortly after the Reod — which goes some way toward explaining her lack of grief, but does not, to Sarene's ear, explain it entirely.

Ashe tells her her father is desperate to speak with her, and the seon's sphere of light contracts into a glowing approximation of King Eventeo's broad, oval-chinned face, projected through a parallel seon in Teod — probably Dio. Eventeo does not laugh, as she feared. He is worried for her and quietly, seriously, offers to void the contract by royal fiat and bring her home; Teod will always be open to her, customs be damned. She hides the tear that the offer brings up, refuses, and gives him the political answer she also believes — the treaty matters more than her marital comfort, and Wyrn's navies are coming. She vents her impression of Iadon instead, and her father catches the shift in her tone and gets nervous on the king's behalf; he warns her, half laughing, that he does not want to receive a note next month informing him that Iadon has fled to a Korathi monastery and the Arelenes have made her their monarch. The chapter closes on his characteristic booming laughter, on his promise to fetch her mother, and on his cheerful aside that her mother will faint when she hears Sarene has already killed off the poor prince.