(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Veil strolls a few streets from the tailor's shop, pulls down her hat as if consulting a map, and breathes out Stormlight to overlay Shallan's face with her own. No screaming yellow spren come — Lightweaving is not the trigger that Yokska warned about; fabrials are. Veil likes Kholinar immediately. She likes the way the city rolls across its hills like a lumpy blanket, the cremling-not-crab smell of an alley, the tension of too many people pressed together. Cities, she thinks, are never civilised; they only contain their chaos under pressure. What she does *not* like is that the courtyards in even the affluent area are clogged with what were villagers a month ago, and that with the parshmen gone there is no one to do the menial labour that holds a city together.

Wandering toward the palace she gives a wide berth to a group of cultists dressed as rotspren in wet red paint — too theatrical and too many of them to all be deranged, she decides; this is a fad. A crowd-fad is more dangerous than a single mad person. The richer she gets, the more bunker-like the mansions look, and the more of them have been ransacked — gates broken in, blankets and shanties draped across the grounds. Closer to the palace the streets empty out, and the prickling on her skin grows; through one iron gate she sees soldiers in unknown dark colours and cannot make out their eyes, and they move in *bursts*, like predators, never speaking to each other as they pass.

She slips into the one nearby park she has seen unclogged of refugees and, under the canopy of stumpweight trees, switches her Lightweaving from Veil to a sketched-out Lyn — sturdier build, blue scout's uniform, hat reshaped to a black Weeping rain hat. *Veil playing a part.* She circles east to look at the Oathgate. The platform is sealed off and built over: covered in buildings, connected to the palace by a roofed walkway laid right across the ramp, the only other access cut into the rock as stairs and currently guarded by people in spren costumes. So the cult is mixed up in the gate too. Smoke and what may be screams rise from the platform.

She finds Kaladin leaning at the base of a bronze statue of an armoured figure rising from waves, in the square before the long palace steps. She passes him a teasing passcode about her boots; he hands her the king's sealed letter. *I like him,* she catches herself thinking — much stronger as Veil than as Shallan — *those dangerous eyes; you can tease him in the most satisfying ways.* Some part of her that is still Shallan is bothered by the thought, so she looks at the palace instead. It is a low rectangular fortress with successively thinner upper storeys and a central dome. From up close she cannot find the line between sun and shadow, and every time she glances away and back she has to wonder whether the planter has moved, whether that door was always blue. She takes two Memories from the same angle to test it. Kaladin points out the men between the pillars at the top of the stairs — standing like statues, spears upright, never moving. Some of the anticipationspren around her have grown long thin tendrils like servant-lashes.

*I'll go alone,* she says. *If something goes wrong, I'd rather you be ready out here.* She climbs the steps — they seem for a moment to stretch into the void — and at the top the guards immediately gather around her and prod her through a door. The grand entry is normal: marble, sphere chandelier, a captainlord in a side room. They take the letter. She asks her credential check — *Captain Colot at the Plains* — and the captainlord nods and tells one of his men to take it to Queen Aesudan.

Then one of the soldiers runs her through.

She is left gaping at his sword as he yanks it back out. She drops, blood spreading; painspren rise. *Do as Jasnah did,* she thinks — *feign* — and pulls in a single short breath of Stormlight, just enough to heal the wound from the inside while she lies still. *Pattern. Don't go. Don't hum. Stay quiet.* A soldier shoulders her like a sack and carries her past dozens of soldiers leaning along the wide hallway — alive, but standing in place, *human but wrong*. As they pass a tall mirror in a bronze frame she cracks one eye and sees the guard's reflection with her thrown over his shoulder — and behind that, deep within the glass, *something* turns the way a man turns when he realises he is being watched. A shadow-shape with white spots for eyes, surprised. She shuts the eye.

The guard carries her down a set of stairs, opens a door, throws her hat on top of her, and leaves. She waits as long as she can stand, then opens her eyes in pitch dark to the stench of rot, and infuses herself for light. She has been dropped beside seven corpses in fine clothes — three male, four female, rotspren crawling on them, cremlings at the faces. Probably the missing lighteyed petitioners. She climbs the wine cellar stairs holding in a scream; at the door Pattern's voice finally comes back to her, distant, working out aloud that she destroys some things easily but is upset by seeing others destroyed. She rests her forehead on the door. *Don't see it.*

She switches her disguise to a sketchbook *servant woman* — covers the blood — and goes the other way, deeper into the rock. The tunnel turns out to be the Kholin mausoleum, lined with stone-statue old kings, their eyes following her down empty halls. She finds a door with sunlight under it. Pattern slides under, reports two guards, and she infuses him to slide along the outside wall and call them in the captainlord's voice. It is not a perfect impression — she never sketched the man — but they go. She slips out at the foot of the palace cliff, sprints into the streets, and collapses in the shadow of a hollow building. *Go find Kaladin,* she tells Pattern. *Tell him soldiers might be watching him from the palace, and might come for him.*

Kaladin arrives — *Storms! Shallan, what happened to you?* — kneels beside her. *Well,* she manages, *as a connoisseur of things that have killed me, I think a sword happened.* *The evil force that rules the palace did not think highly of someone coming with a letter from the king.* She smiles for him, because she needs what happened to be all right, just another infiltration she can roll off; he matches her — *I'm glad we took a stab at this anyway* — helps her up, and starts to check the wound until she slaps his surgeon's hand away from a not-appropriate location. Back to the hideout, she says. *I'd rather not be killed again today. It's quite draining.*