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Rysn arrives at Urithiru by Oathgate and is received by a master-servant guide and four Alethi porters who carry a single-person palanquin sent by Brightness Navani herself. Her own porter Nikli tries to insist that the rebsk always travels in her wheeled chair; Rysn corrects him gently, accepting the palanquin as a matter of polite trade-craft, and has him transfer her into it before lifting Chiri-Chiri from her basket onto her lap. Carried down the Oathgate ramp with the curtains open, she takes in the wide plateau of ten Oathgate platforms and the impossible ten-tiered tower behind it — and notes the supposedly innocuous lift project her babsk warned her of, two enormous wooden platforms being raised on the plateau's cliffs around a new conjoined-fabrial design of Queen Navani's. If the rumours she has heard are true, those platforms are quietly meant for a great deal more than archers.

The porters bear her through the crowded hallways of the tower, past the great window with its frozen wilderness, and up several stories in a fabrial lift to a small audience chamber where Navani Kholin is hearing petitioners. Rysn has been taught from the start of her apprenticeship not to ask what she can get from a meeting but what need she can fulfil; that is the true work of a merchant, and even queens have needs. Nikli sets her in a chair before the desk and withdraws to wait by the door beside the guards and a young scribe taking minutes. Navani, distracted, takes a moment to recall who Rysn is — then waves up the relevant notes, drags her own chair across the room so they can speak at eye level, and turns the conversation to the ghost ship.

Rysn has toured the derelict First Dreams in person, carried aboard by her porters, and reports what she saw. Whoever set the vessel adrift tried to scuttle her and did not know modern Thaylen hulls do not sink so easily; the logbooks are gone, there is no blood on the deck, and the rumoured passenger — a runaway Soulcaster, a woman trained in the use of one of the rare ancient devices though not a Radiant — is not aboard, nor is her device. Navani adds more than Vstim knew: the prince of Liafor says the Soulcaster believed Aimia might hold the means to heal her affliction, and the ship's captain, Vazrmeb, was infatuated with the legendary wealth of Akinah. Rysn observes, carefully, that Soulcasting is the half-spoken reason Alethi armies are winning this war.

Navani presses on. The large island of Aimia has been combed bare, but her Windrunners have charted a peculiar standing weather pattern over a small island farther out — the same fixed storm the First Dreams was bound for — and she believes Akinah lies hidden inside it. Her husband worries the storm masks an enemy stronghold. When Rysn asks why a flying Windrunner cannot simply look, Navani tells her plainly: something inside that storm undermines Knights Radiant, her scouts saw small shadows darting in the clouds, and old Aimian legends speak of creatures that feed on Stormlight. Reflexively Rysn glances at the palanquin. Navani has already noticed. She asks to see the creature, promising she will not try to take it.

Rysn permits it. Chiri-Chiri climbs out, flies to a wall fixture, and noisily drains the lamp dark before dropping to the desk to play with the diamond chips Navani scatters for her. Rysn warns that she has no more of them; the larkin was a single gift from the Reshi Isles, not a hidden Thaylen weapon. Navani would dearly like to study one. Rysn does not refuse outright — she trusts the queen well enough — but she understands that queens generally get what they want, and resolves to fill that need by some other route.

The ask becomes concrete. The Wandersail has fabrial pumps and modern storm stabilisers; if any vessel can punch through the standing storm around Akinah, hers can. Navani offers generous payment terms and traditional salvage rights for the crew, asks for nothing but that a single scribe of hers be carried to the place, allowed to survey for a day, and brought home; she will lend a Windrunner or two for morale and ask the queen of Thaylenah to write personally to the sailors. Rysn names her own price softly: she has watched Chiri-Chiri fly free and looked at her own wheeled chair, and dared to wonder whether the queen's new lift fabrials might give her a way to move under her own power. Navani offers a scribe versed in the new fabrial designs who can run her experiments aboard the ship and demonstrate what the technology can do. The bargain closes. The Wandersail is at the queen's disposal.