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Raoden sits on a rooftop a few buildings from the chapel watching Ien bob in the afternoon air. He and Galladon have been ejected from their usual study by an apologetic Kahar, who needed the chapel to himself for the final polishing. Studying Ien from above, Raoden thinks he sees what is wrong with the seon at last. Ien is the Aon for healing; the light at the centre of the floating sphere now shows tiny breaks in its lines and patches of weakness in its colour. The Aon is no longer whole. Galladon grunts at the observation without much interest.

A memory pulls Raoden sideways. As a small boy he had once tried to set Ien free, tearfully, after a tutor's lesson on slavery convinced him the seons were being held against their will. Ien had patiently explained that seons do not see rank or above-and-beneath, only those they love; their payment is the satisfaction of seeing those they love grow. Years of Korathi sermons on the unifying power of love had clarified the answer for him in time. seons are something like an expression of Domi Himself, closer to heaven through their service than their supposed masters can comprehend.

Galladon asks him a softer question — what one thing he would bring into Elantris if he could have any single thing from outside. The Dula would choose his own cabin in Duladel, every board and nail his own work. Raoden takes a moment and then answers, to Galladon's surprise, that he would bring a stack of letters. They were from the woman he had been about to marry. He had never met her in person, but Sarene of Teod had begun writing to him about a year ago, had proposed politically and shamelessly five months in to firm an alliance between their countries against Fjorden's rising tide, and had been the brightest single thing in a very dark year in which his father seemed determined to break Arelon. They had begun speaking through their seons after the betrothal — sometimes for hours at a time — and her wit and warmth had become a real source of hope. He had been excited about the marriage, despite the politics underneath it.

He lets slip, in passing, that the union had been a reaction to the Derethi invasion of Duladel. Galladon freezes. He had been thrown into Elantris only a few months ago and has been assuming, all this time, that the Duladen Republic still stood. Raoden gives him the news in pieces — revolution, republican class destroyed, monarchy restored, Shu-Dereth the state religion, Jesker effectively gone — and tries to soften the last with a mention of the surviving Mysteries. Galladon cuts him short. The Mysteries are not Jesker but a mockery of things sacred, practised only by outsiders without any true understanding of the Dor. Raoden leaves him alone on the rooftop with his grief.

Returning to the chapel, Raoden is silenced by what Kahar has uncovered. The slime is gone. The chapel is a sunlit room of whitish-grey marble, every surface buffed to a near-mirror, and the western windows are placed at exactly the angle to throw light across the floor and pick out, in the walls, shallow half-inch reliefs whose detail Kahar did not even know were there until he had finished cleaning the floor. The expressions on the carved figures are lifelike. Kahar glows with the holy pride of the indignantly useful. Raoden gives him his next assignment — to clean the paving stones of every street the band now occupies, since a people who live in filth will believe they deserve filth — and tells him he will be given workers. Raoden's band has grown enormously since Karata folded under his banner, drawing in solo Elantrians from the streets in a last attempt to avoid madness. Kahar turns at the door to admit, with quiet wonder, that he has not been hungry in days. The man came in looking for a magical secret and found a much more humble one: pain loses its power when other things become more important.

Alone in the polished hall, Raoden catches his own reflection in a clean stretch of wall and is shocked. The face is not one he recognises. He had wondered all along why no one in Elantris connected Spirit to the prince whose face had been known to the outer plantations, and had been telling himself that no Elantrian would think to look. He sees now there is another reason. Two weeks have stripped him. His hair is gone; his skin under the blotches is a flat grey; his eyes are sinking; his lips are wrinkling. Elantrians are not so much rotting corpses, he realises, as withering husks. The shape of him is still there, but it has been hollowed.

Galladon arrives in the doorway, having shouldered his grief enough to walk. He compliments Kahar's work — the chapel looks almost free of the Reod — and observes the bigger crew now visible through the window working the chapel's garden clear. Raoden tells him the people are coming because the band offers them more than life in an alley, and Karata is rescuing every newcomer she can from the gates. He then walks Galladon to a loose stone at the back of the chapel and pulls out the small bags of seed corn he has been hoarding. As a Duladen farmer, what does Galladon think of the grade? Not bad — not the best, but not bad. The planting season, with the recent warm weather, is now. Raoden wants him to plant it. Galladon argues — Elantrians will tear up the first sprouts they see; there is not enough land here for a real crop; there is no "next year" in Elantris because nobody lasts that long. Raoden answers each in turn — minds are changing; this will be a garden, not a farm, and next year they can use the palace gardens; if his band do not reap the harvest, the next people in will. Galladon takes the corn. Raoden adds that the past need not become their future too.

Saolin calls from the makeshift watchtower he has built that someone is coming. One of Karata's men bursts in begging Raoden to come at once. At her palace doorway he and Galladon find Karata's board-faced second Dashe buckling on weapons with two thirds of her people behind him. One of Dashe's scouts has overheard Aanden plan an attack on her palace; Dashe has wanted to settle the question of Aanden for months, and this is the excuse he needed. Karata argues hard — they cannot afford to lose anyone, Aanden's men outnumber theirs — and Dashe tells her he can no longer wait while Aanden threatens the children. The strike force leaves. Karata turns to Raoden in helpless betrayal; Dashe is hers and she knows him too well to stop him. Raoden refuses to accept that.

She leads them by a parallel route to the breach Dashe will use. A low building shares a wall with the university, the wall has fallen, and its rubble has knocked a hole through the university's. The hole is the obvious back door. The building is also obviously a trap. Galladon points at the support beams — freshly cut, the structure rigged to collapse. Aanden knew Dashe was coming. Karata is sure Dashe will walk in without looking up. Raoden kneels by the doorframe to think and runs out of time. Dashe's men appear at the far door and start in. From the rubble on the university side, men step into view; one of them, holding a worn fire axe and his familiar drooping false mustache, is Aanden himself, axe raised over the central support pillar. Raoden shouts a warning — and stops the axe in mid-swing by addressing Aanden by his real name. Taan.

Half the false mustache slumps. Dashe warns from his side that the man is insane; Raoden disagrees aloud — anyone can babble, but an insane man does not plan to boil parchment for food, and he certainly does not engineer a structural trap. Raoden steps further into the rigged building over Karata's gasp and Galladon's curse. He stops by a fallen stone table at the centre of the room, takes the remnant of his sleeve, and wipes the slime off the tabletop. Beneath it are intricate carvings of the same sort Kahar uncovered in the chapel. He turns back to the man with the axe. Taan had been one of Kae's finest sculptors before the Shaod took him. The city he has been pretending to rule from a gold chair is also a stonecarver's living museum, every wall a master class. Only Taan, out of all the sculptors in the world, can walk these streets and learn from them. Why be Aanden the invented baron when he could be Taan the sculptor in Elantris itself?

The axe clangs to the floor. Taan turns to the wall beside him, brushes its slime away with a quivering sleeve, finds a relief, whispers an invocation, and crumples weeping at the discovery that he had been about to bring it all down. He rips off the false mustache.

The danger is not over. Aanden's men still have rocks and steel rods; Dashe and his people have come further into the room. Raoden places himself between the two groups, raises both arms, and turns the rescue argument into the larger one. They are too few to lose anyone. The cursed need not eat, need not fight, need not rank one another; eating is the source of every struggle outside, and they have been freed from it. Their bodies do not need clothes for warmth; their stomachs do not require food. The titles and the classes belong to another country. Why squander an eternity of pain on a few minutes of released hatred? The weapons lower, slowly. Taan himself rises and orders his men, voice firm despite his small frame, to put down their weapons; he, not Aanden, leads now, and there is more royalty in Spirit's argument than there ever was in his pretend court. Dashe drops his sword first and walks out. His men follow. Taan thanks Raoden without knowing whom he is thanking, and Raoden invites him back to the chapel — there is a building he should see.