POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan Lightweaves her face longer, her nose pointed, her hair black, then trades a havah for trousers, boots, a long white coat, a single glove, and a knife-handled satchel — and is Veil. Setting Shallan's pain down is, Shallan notices from a distance, almost a relief. She picks Pattern off the wall onto her coat, slips out the field-balcony, and crosses through Sebarial's bustling quarter into the empty strata-lined corridors of the upper tower toward the market.
Pattern judges her face a *good lie*, and not like the other; Radiant she slips in and out of like the sun behind clouds. He has also decided, delightedly, that he no longer has to hate Adolin for carrying a sword made of a dead spren — humans build chairs and clothing and food out of corpses too, so Kholin at least respects his. Wonderfully smart man. Why doesn't Veil marry him? Because that's not an option. He settles into a contented buzz.
On the long walk in Veil asks softly what Pattern meant the night they first became Radiant, about dying. He offers it again, gently: she will hate him for making her speak the next Truth, so he could die, and another spren could come bond her. *Please don't leave me*, she whispers. *I hate myself too. Just don't go.* He hums what may be agitation and may be pleasure.
The market — the Breakaway — opens out into a vast lower cavern of stitched-together tents and stone shops and rolled-up sleeves of lighteyed bouncers. Hundreds of people, despite the hour. Three cobblers in a row. A central well of crem-free water that, like every other tower well, never drops no matter how much is drawn from it. The chaos delights Veil. She sits on the well's edge listening to women worry about the new storm and men worry about being pressed into the army, then ambles toward the bars.
She picks a low-end battle-tent first, leans against a stacked-crate counter and almost knocks it over, and orders sapphire wine — fancy. The barkeep cocks a hard look at her, and a young bouncer named Jor starts laughing before Veil can drink. The tiny cup turns out to be near-pure tallew spirit; she gulps it, chokes, gets clapped at. The barkeep tries to redirect her to something with fruit in it. Veil orders another. And another. Jor decides he is flirting with her. Shallan's annoyance gives way to a guilty flattered note, and she keeps drinking, listening to him talk past her about which fancy lighteyed parties he has worked. She is not, she realizes, going to be able to imitate any of this from a stool. She has to walk among them first.
She finally tries to leave, the floor pitches, and she slides off her seat onto the stone. Jor crouches to call her a palanquin; in one breath she draws a smidge of Stormlight from her satchel and the whole drunken cloud puffs away. Sober. Standing. Hair pulled back. *Where do people get stabbed around here?* she asks sweetly. He answers: All's Alley. Stay away. Someone got stabbed behind one of the tents just last night. She tips him a sphere, pats his cheek, walks out, and leaves him asking the room whether he just got played.
Outside, Pattern folds onto her collar and worries that the lies she puts on are doing her some kind of harm. *Veil is just a face*, he says, which is what frightens Shallan: Veil doesn't giggle, Veil doesn't sit locked away in a manor, Veil never murdered her own family. Shallan stops mid-stride suddenly terrified that she has invented all those spanreed letters from Balat and her brothers might already be dead. Pattern reassures her that they live, that Mraize has them, that this is one she can tell isn't a lie. She slides Veil back on and decides she needs to go deeper into her, not stay on the surface.
All's Alley turns out to be five differently-coloured tents sewn together, with a squat scarred bouncer at the door who lets her through. Inside is dim, sour with the smell of crammed-together drunks, partitioned into alcoves with actual tables. She walks up to the cloth-draped plank that serves as a bar and asks the fat barkeep — possibly lighteyed, hard to tell in the dim — for the strongest thing he has. He pours her Veden saph; she demands stronger; he pulls out an unlabeled jug of clear Horneater white and warns her it takes paint off. She downs a cup, takes a hit of Stormlight to keep from throwing up, and tells him to leave the jug.
She tells him she is looking for a man who killed her little sister, by a particular method. The barkeep says the man who killed two women in the alley behind the tents has *already been dealt with*, then nods her toward an alcove of *everyday, ordinary thugs* who do that dealing on his behalf. She takes a sip and walks in.
The thugs lounge around their table like cats with affectations of indifference. The lighteyed Betha presides in a havah with a fingerless glove instead of a safehand sleeve. Veil steps into an empty chair at the table; Betha tells her it belongs to Ur, and Ur, returning, picks her up and dumps her on the floor. She gets up, removes a long thin knife from her satchel, lays her safehand flat over Ur's on the table to confuse him, and drives the knife down through both. He topples back howling. She sits down again, wraps her cut hand in a handkerchief to hide that she's about to heal it, and tells Betha her crew is not a threat — and that her patience is gone.
She scratches three interlocking diamonds into the tabletop. Betha gasps. Mark of the Ghostbloods, known well enough among the local thugs to terrify them more than knife-through-hand had. *We want nothing to do with your type.* They tell Veil the killer was just Ned out of Sadeas's old camp, an angry drunk who finally strangled his wife Rem; Ur took him on the long walk and pushed him off the plateau. Wrong knife: this wasn't her quarry. She gives a polite exit speech, leaves them spheres for their drinks, walks back into the main tent — and overhears, from the alcove, Ur worrying *that's not why she came back, it was about the other woman he killed*. *Course* — the woman didn't matter to anybody — *it could have been about the other one.*
Veil spins back into the alcove. There was another murder? Betha, pried open, tells her: the next night, after Rem, a barmaid here was strangled in the same way and left posed in the same way. Same marks of the ring scraping the chin. Even Ned screamed on his walk to the plateau that he hadn't killed the second one. Exactly the same.
Veil settles her tab too generously, hooks her jug of Horneater white off the bar by the thumb, and carts it back out into the Breakaway night. A second double, same signature, in the tower under Adolin's nose. The murderer is not Ned.