POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan has settled against the tiled wall of Urithiru's basement library, where the rows of dust have all been catalogued away and the empty floor only emphasises how little Jasnah and Navani's scholars actually recovered. Jasnah has chosen this room because she is convinced the rest of the tower can be spied upon; today's council is a small core — the Blackthorn, Navani, Jasnah, Renarin, Shallan, and Kaladin — with Adolin and Elhokar away in Vedenar surveying Taravangian's army through Malata's Oathgate. Without warning, Jasnah tells Shallan to take the shorthand. She has been sketching Kaladin in her notebook.
Kaladin, leaning against the wall, summarises the previous night's revelation flatly: the Almighty is dead, the Heralds are traitors or madmen, and the maddest of them was in Kholin custody until they lost him moving everyone to Urithiru. He still insists the parshmen are not the enemy, only the Fused leading them; Jasnah coolly answers that the common parshmen may want only to live, but their leaders intend humanity's extinction. Dalinar cuts the argument, allows Kaladin's point its credit, and promises that once Alethkar is secured he will do something he would never have considered before — try to negotiate.
Tactical work follows. Dalinar sets the strike force for Kholinar at six: Kaladin flying ahead of a highstorm with three of his men, plus Elhokar and Adolin as a second Shardbearer in case of emergency. Kaladin questions why the king himself must come; Dalinar says only that Elhokar has personal reasons. Kaladin promises to do what is right regardless of his feelings on the matter. Navani reports that the spanreeds in the city have all fallen silent, matching the Stormfather's blind spot over Kholinar; the force may walk into an already-occupied capital.
Jasnah calls the plan too small. The Fused are functionally immortal now that the Heralds have failed; an enemy with an endless supply of parshman bodies and Surgebinding of their own demands a longer-term answer. Her answer, when Dalinar asks for one, is blunt: find the Heralds and kill them, in the hope that their pact will reseal even partially. Kaladin erupts. Jasnah is unperturbed — she has sympathy in abundance, she tells him; she just bothers to season it with reason, which he might consider acquiring. He fires back through the spreading metaphor of mink kits and eels; she smiles, then redirects him to actual work, asking whether his squires could fly above the storms to scout the Voidbringer movements now that spanreeds are unreliable. He agrees. The conversation broadens out into Dalinar's coalition of monarchs and the strategic value of the western Oathgate in Shin lands, while Shallan manages perhaps three lines of notes.
Jasnah notices the sketch, calls a break, and takes Shallan to the far end of the room for a calm, private dressing-down. She is impressed, she says, by what Shallan has done — earning Dalinar's trust is not a small thing — but Shallan is now a Radiant without armour, a scholar in training who skips meetings and slips out early, and a woman who keeps too many secrets. The wardship is not finished. Her path as a Radiant is one thing; her duty to her mistress as a scholar is another and will continue. Shallan burns with shame and resentment in equal measure. Then Pattern buzzes quietly that this room has *memories,* and Shallan slips Jasnah a note suggesting an investigation in Shadesmar — which Jasnah accepts with thanks and a reminder never to ignore an offhand comment from one's spren.
The meeting reconvenes around specific kingdoms, with Jasnah eager to pull the Shin in for the sake of the westernmost Oathgate; Shallan daydreams again and turns in a sheet of shorthand with a long blank stretch in the middle, annotated only with a snide one-liner to the effect that whatever the Blackthorn had said there must surely have been important enough for Jasnah to remember on her own. Jasnah sends her to make a longhand copy for the queen and the king's head scribe. Shallan flees up the stairs feeling like a dismissed pupil, hating that part of her wants to dash off and earn her mistress's approval.
In her own rooms she digs out the coat and hat — let Veil figure out what to do — and finds a folded letter pinned inside the coat. It is from Mraize. Her reward, he says, for investigating the Unmade and frightening it off: the truth about her dead brother. Two institutions other than the Ghostbloods foresaw the return of the Voidbringers. The first are the Sons of Honor — Gavilar Kholin their driving force, who brought Amaram in and was probably assassinated for trying to provoke a Desolation. The second are the Skybreakers, the only Radiant order that did not break at the Recreance, led from antiquity by the Herald Nalan'Elin — *Nale* — who is no friend to anyone close to bonding a spren. He recruits some and dispatches the rest, by his own hand if they have already bonded, by a minion otherwise. A minion like her brother. Nan Helaran had been recruited by Nale himself with displays of Shards and power, and the strike on Amaram had been his proving test — either that or simply a blow against the Sons of Honor. The letter ends with a pointed reassurance: a bridgeman was not, so far as the Ghostbloods know, on the Skybreakers' list — if he had been, he would never have survived his months as a slave.