(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

The city is so stuffed with secrets, Shallan thinks, that the only thing for her to do is punch herself in the face. She tries — out in the tailor's showroom, eyes squeezed shut — and only flinches, then realises she can't possibly hit herself hard enough. From the back room she can hear Yokska in halting deference beginning to tell the king everything she knows about what has happened to Kholinar. *Secrets caused all of this.* She peeks in. Elhokar, Adolin, Kaladin and Yokska sit ringed up in spherelight under the dummies wearing brightly-coloured, gold-thread, big-pocketed coats; their disguises are off. Her three irregulars — Vathah, Red, Ishnah — have been sent up with the housemaid to ready rooms. Yokska's husband, who is white-bearded after the Horneater style, has not yet said a single word.

Spotting fabric scissors on a ledge, Shallan gathers her skirt aside and stabs herself in the leg, hard. The pain sears up her body and painspren crawl up out of the floor — but these are sickly green instead of orange, and look like sinewy clawed monster-hands rather than the disembodied human ones she's used to. Pattern buzzes worry from the wall: *destruction. This is not normal for you, Shallan. Too far.* She takes a Memory, draws in a little Stormlight to heal, rinses her hands, then comes back to the doorway with sketchpad in hand to draw.

Yokska lays it all out. The trouble began with the riots — or maybe before, with something she can't quite name — and accelerated when Queen Aesudan publicly hanged an ardent who had written sharp things about the monarchy and her faith. The queen mostly vanished after that and sent occasional proclamations that didn't quite make sense; she declared the city's parshmen to be Voidbringers and ordered them executed (though that order was issued *before* the Everstorm and the gloom over the palace — a chronology Elhokar insists on smoothing over by blaming the dark spren for everything). The Palace Guard retreated inside the palace; the City Watch was barricaded into the barracks and eventually walked into the palace as well, and has not come back out. Then a coalition of important lighteyes who refused to execute the parshmen went up to the palace to remonstrate with the queen. *They never came back from the palace,* Kaladin guesses. They did not.

Shallan writes silently. This is a different Unmade from the one she and Adolin fought below Urithiru — that one mimicked people and produced paired murders; this one warps emotion spren. She has drawn the green painspren; her sketches of the warped exhaustionspren and shamespren follow. The Wall Guard, under the new and unknown Highmarshal Azure, eventually restored some order, rounded up the parshmen, and exiled them onto the plain; the parshmen were therefore safely outside the city when the Everstorm came.

For her last data point, Shallan needs an embarrassment-source. Remembering childhood wine spills and the morning she faced Jasnah after almost dying does not even raise the spren. So she undoes a safehand sleeve button, then strolls into the back room as if distracted, trips over a roll of cloth and lands in the middle of the circle of chairs — skirts up to the waist, bare safehand splayed in front of king, Kaladin and Adolin. Shamespren hail down around her — *normally falling red and white flower petals*, but here pieces of broken glass. She takes the Memory, scrambles upright, downs a cup of wine at Yokska's husband's tray on the way out — *I'mfinethatwasanexperiment* — and throws herself into a chair in the showroom.

Yokska resumes. The Wall Guard keeps the wall but does not police the city; the city is held in pieces by the surviving highlords, increasingly isolated; and the *real* power in Kholinar is the Cult of Moments, which the Vorin church has declared heretical even as the cult absorbs the city's frightened. *And then,* Yokska adds, *there are the fabrials.* Shallan sticks her head back in. Anyone who uses *any* fabrial in Kholinar draws screaming yellow spren — streaks of terrible light riding the wind — which then bring the loose-clothed, long-speared flying creatures from the sky to seize the fabrial and sometimes kill the user. Shallan mercifully suggests they let the tailor rest. Yokska is grateful.

The four of them retreat to the showroom to digest. Kaladin wants to know about Azure — *someone is providing grain; this place would have eaten itself to starvation without a source* — and Adolin confirms no one of that name was on the rolls when he left for the Plains. Shallan shows her drawings of the warped spren. Elhokar argues that the enemy intends to isolate the city: lock down the Oathgate, cut the spanreeds, then bring up enough army to finish it. They cannot afford to wait. He proposes a probe: Shallan will go as a messenger from the Plains, present a sealed letter from him at the palace door, and *see how the guards there react*. *I'm the only one here who's confronted one of the Unmade directly,* Shallan agrees, *and I have the resources to get out.* Pattern unexpectedly speaks up from her skirts: *I will watch and warn. We will be careful.*

Elhokar sends Kaladin along as backup, on the meet-up steps of the palace square. *Waiting and trusting those whom you have empowered is the soul of kingship.* Shallan heads upstairs to change. In her room she finds Vathah, Red and Ishnah (the last admits she searched the tailor's bedroom and found nothing). The Kholinar mission is going to bring Veil out into the open in front of her own team, and Shallan decides — Pattern murmuring *Mmm. It's good. Progress.* — to stop hiding. She pulls out Veil's white coat and folded hat and tells Vathah and Red to give Veil some privacy to dress. Red laughs and admits he feels like an idiot; Vathah takes it as though it had been obvious all along. Ishnah confides that she had it backward — she'd assumed *Brightness Shallan* was the disguise. *Wrong*, Shallan tells her. *They're both equally false.* Then she sends Ishnah to fetch Kaladin in an hour, climbs out the window, drops a story to the street on a cushion of Stormlight, and strides off.