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A framed story. King Raoden sits in his palace inside the restored Elantris, the walls glowing with the soft inner light he and Galladon had forgotten the stones used to give, waiting on a wife who is — Ashe reports — pregnant, late, and using both facts as leverage. Looking at his empty plate the king thinks back to New Elantris and the spare peace they had to fight for inside it, and finally asks the Seon the question he has carried for some time: where was Ashe during the last hours before the city was restored? He remembers nothing of him for most of that night except the single moment Ashe flew in to say Sarene had been taken to Teod. The Seon settles by the chair and tells him.

The story is Matisse's. She is putting the fifty children of the Roost to bed in New Elantris on a night when nothing wants to settle. Teor and Tiil try to talk their way into staying up — the adults are out in the courtyard drawing Aons late into the night, plainly working on something — and she scares them back under their sheets by threatening another writing lesson. The small girl Riika asks for a story from her seon Mai, who has gone mad somewhere out in the city since the Shaod took her. The grumpy teenage boy Idotris sits at the door under protest; he had wanted Dashe's soldier-line, not child-care. Matisse feels the same low apprehension the children do — Lord Spirit is absent, Galladon has told everyone not to worry, which is itself a sign — and slips outside to look at the drill in the courtyard.

A hundred-odd Elantrians stand in near-unison while Galladon calls out the strokes in his Dula drawl. They are practising a new line they have been missing for ten years — one Galladon adds to Aon Rao rather than Aon Daa so they do not blow holes in their own sidewalks. Dashe watches with his hand on his sword, muttering that Spirit should be home with his people; Matisse — who long ago started calling Dashe *Father*, after he and Karata took her in from a sludge-filled alley — gentles him. Ashe drops out of the night with a message from his mistress for Karata, who is off in some "library" Matisse has never been told about. With Karata absent Ashe hands the message to Dashe: an unannounced shipment of weapons is on the way. Dashe perks up and goes to muster men. Matisse borrows Ashe for an experiment.

The experiment is small. She walks him into the Roost as her storyteller, and the deep measured voice of a seon does what nothing else has done for weeks: Riika settles, and so do the rest of the stragglers. Outside again, Ashe muses to her that almost no Elantrian once went without a seon, and that if Lord Spirit is going to fix AonDor he can probably fix the city — at which point Matisse ought to be given a seon of her own. He suggests Ati, the Aon for hope, which is hers. The exchange is broken by Mareshe coming down the street with a lantern and his usual indignation: Dashe is out swinging swords in the middle of the night, Galladon and Karata are off again at one of their secret conferences, and he, supposedly in charge, has been left holding nothing. Matisse is just turning over how to coax the location of that library out of Ashe when the screaming starts at the front of the city.

Ashe flies up and comes back terrified: hundreds of red-uniformed soldiers with the height and dark hair of Fjordells — the Dakhor strike — have overrun New Elantris and are killing whoever they find. The Roost's adult supervisor Taid rushes off into the dark in his nightgown and does not return. Matisse takes the only plan that fits the geography: the cleaned section is the obvious target, the wider sludge-choked ruin of Elantris beyond it the hiding place. She sends Ashe for her father, grabs lanterns from the supply building, has Idotris wake the children, and tells Teor and Tiil that they are her sub-captains now because her father is a captain and rank, she informs them, is hereditary. Lit lanterns gather the small ones around her like moths, and the band of fifty children moves out of the Roost toward the edge of New Elantris.

At that edge, with the centre of the city already burning behind them, three Dakhor soldiers cut across the escape route. Ashe dives in and circles their heads as a distraction; Dashe charges out of a shadowed alley and takes the squad from the side. He fights well but two more soldiers join him and an Elantrian body has nothing to give. Matisse watches her father's face turn to dread, watches him mouth at her to run, and watches a sword go through his chest. He falls and slips into the Hoed mantra — *Run, Matisse. Run to safety.* The three remaining soldiers turn for her.

She sends Ashe ahead with orders for Idotris to douse his lantern and guide the children north to the squat building Ashe has mentioned — the hidden library marked by Aon Rao — where Karata and Galladon are. Then, to keep the soldiers chasing her instead, she draws Aon Ashe in the air in front of their faces and adds the chasm line Galladon taught the courtyard a few hours earlier. The Aon answers — the first Aon to answer in ten years inside Elantris — and a brilliant flash blinds the soldiers. She runs into the unswept reaches of the city with her lantern, drawing them after her light.

Trained soldiers know how to flank. She rounds a corner straight into a waiting pair, kicks one off his feet in the slime she knows how to move through and they do not, and twists her ankle escaping — a pain that flares and stays, an Elantrian's wound that will not heal. Limping in a panicked circle, she ends up back at Dashe's body and whispers the Hoed mantra with him. A soldier finds her there, drags her off the corpse, and demands in broken speech where the rest of the children went; when she will not say, he reaches for his knife. Then the horizon flares with the dawn and the Shaod completes in her at last — silver skin, healed cheek, a heart beating again. The soldier notes the change with confusion and raises the knife anyway. Behind him a voice observes that if the light healed her it healed him too: Dashe stands at her back glowing with inner light, the sword that impaled him in his hand, and the soldier collapses. She runs to her father weeping — tears she can finally make — and tells him she took care of the children, because that is her job.

The framing closes. Ashe explains the rest to Raoden: he led the children to the hidden library himself, where Galladon and Karata were already gone — they must have crossed in the dark on their way back to the city — and he stayed with the children inside to keep them calm. Raoden sits with how much the little daughter of Dashe carried that night, and remembers that he later thanked Dashe with two recovered seons whose own masters had died, one of which Dashe passed to her. He guesses her seon is the one named for hope — Ati — and Ashe corrects him gently as Sarene enters, pregnant belly first. It is Aeo. Bravery.