(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Shallan paces her bare room with May Aladar's notebook in hand, arguing the Perel case against Adolin, who lounges with his back to the wall tossing a small leather grain-ball into the air and catching it with the right hand Renarin healed. The murders share method, posing, and a single back corridor of the tower — that, Shallan is sure, places the killer in a specific stretch of the building — but the victims have nothing else in common. Sadeas was hated slime always under guard; Perel was a quiet administrator with no enemies. Adolin keeps wanting two killers, one a copycat opportunist. Shallan notes — and does not say — that he has fallen in love with his first theory; she also notes that if the murderer is not opportunistic, there might be other deaths of unimportant people no one bothered to look at. She needs to get out into the markets in Veil's face and listen.

Adolin stretches and steers the conversation to *something else*. Shallan braces — convinced he is going to break off the betrothal, or maybe ask about the mother she stabbed through the chest as a child — and instead Adolin tells her, beaming, that *she has a Shardblade*. He has been dying to teach her. Women, Radiants, whatever — custom can go to Damnation; she has a sword and she should know how to use it. He runs out for sparring sleeves before she can think of an excuse.

The truth she does not speak crashes down on her in the silence. She killed her mother with this Blade. Holding Pattern as steel will, every time, be holding the thing she did. She scrambles to the small mirror on the wall, sees her own panic, and goes for her sketchbook. Pattern hums in confusion and offers softly to die, to let another spren come bond her; she nearly comes apart. Then she finds a way out that is not Veil — Adolin cannot meet Veil yet — but a third face: her own, only harder. Hair up. Composure. Jasnah's confidence and subtle half-smile sketched onto her own bones. She draws the woman, breathes Stormlight from her satchel into the illusion, pulls her hair into a bun with hairspikes, undoes the safehand sleeve, and stands up calm. *Brightness Radiant is her name. She will go only by title.*

When Adolin returns, the woman in the room can take Pattern off her shoulder as a long thin Blade without trembling. Pattern dulls his own edge — no metal sleeve required, thank you — and Adolin summons his own sword with its sinuous edge and crystalline-ridged back. Radiant sets her feet, raises the Blade in two hands beside her head, and is promptly stumbled backward by Adolin's thumb against her collarbone. A stance is not a pose. He spends the next hour adjusting her hands and feet and hips ten thousand times, settles her on a basic stance she can grow into Windstance and the lighter dueling forms from, and tells her — without quite laughing — that everything about how she stands, how she breathes, even what she eats before a match will all have to be learned. She must unlearn breathing.

Between corrections Adolin speaks of the Blade the way priests speak of the gods — that the sword is more than her tool, that if she loses she has failed the sword and not the other way around. Radiant asks the question only she could ask, what is it like for him knowing his Blade was once a living spren bonded to a Radiant of his own. He answers with the swordsman's superstition rather than the Vorin doctrine he was raised on — he has always known there is *something* to them — and she sets the question aside. Swordsmen, sailors, ardents: they are all unscientific in the same way.

She lets him model strikes beside her, then breaks long enough to grab her sketchbook, sketch his stance and his finished strike, and try to learn from her own drawing. Real Shallan keeps surfacing — to admire how his shirt fits, to grin at his energy — but every time the memory of her mother tries to come up under the Blade she sinks back into Radiant and stays there. She lets the lesson run late on purpose. At the end she waves Adolin off down the strata-lined hallway with a lamp and the sparring sleeves, Veil's tavern errand postponed another night, and falls asleep for once in genuine quiet.