POV: shallan
Summary
The day after her brutal murder in the palace, Shallan finds the oppression and horror of the experience have receded. What lingers is the single image she glimpsed past the mirror — a flicker of one of the Unmade behind the surface of the glass. She has tested every mirror in Yokska's shop and found them clean, but she has handed sketches of the thing to the others as a warning.
She strolls into the back kitchen where Adolin is eating curry and flatbread and Elhokar, oddly, is *drawing* — a tidy little sketch of Kholinar showing the palace and the gate plateau. Yokska, her husband, and her maid are out shopping with Elhokar's spheres; food is still for sale in Kholinar if you can pay. Kaladin comes through the workroom door. The king has a plan. Aesudan, on the Lightweaver's intelligence, is either being held by her own palace guard or has fallen into whatever has taken them; either way she and little Gavinor need rescuing. But the Oathgate comes first. He assigns Shallan to dig into the Cult of Moments and, if she can, slip into a rite close enough to the platform to use the gate herself. He and Adolin — posing as visiting brightlords up from the Plains — will work the Kholinar houses with private guard, looking for a force big enough to take the palace by arms if it comes to that. Kaladin is to find out what he can about this Highmarshal Azure and the Wall Guard.
Adolin adds the thing that has been hanging in the air: the executed ardent's ten-glyph indictment of Aesudan — wasteful banquets while Kholinar starved, tax hikes, ardent favourites lavished with parties — describes a queen rotted long before the Everstorm. Elhokar flinches; Aesudan was always proud and ambitious, never gluttonous. He admits aloud that Jasnah had warned him not to marry her, and that Jasnah had never understood — *he needed her*, the strength of her. Kaladin adds another loose thread: someone in Kholinar is putting grain on the market even though Yokska insists the palace stores are sealed. A hidden Soulcaster, maybe. The city is keeping too many secrets.
Shallan slips out again as Veil, wearing her coat and trousers, the knife-hole in the back of the coat washed clean by Ishnah and covered for now with a Lightweaving patch. She means to find a replacement coat too. As she walks the streets she notices that she is settling into the persona — back in Urithiru she had still been forcing it on, drinking too much in the bars to prove she could. She winces remembering it; you don't need to drink to look like a Veil, you just need to live in her clothes.
The market she heads for is nothing like Urithiru's plateau bazaars or Kharbranth's night-time bazaars. It is ancient — stalls and awnings worn down by uncounted centuries of foot traffic — and oddly quiet, half its stalls shuttered, the merchants too dispirited to call out. Soldiers in light blue with house glyphs patrol; she clocks them as men of House Velalant, a brightlord Yokska had named as a minor player promoted by default since so many lighteyes vanished into the palace. She tries on coats at two clothiers before she finds one she likes at the third — long, white, past the knee, in the cut of her old one — and pays a small fee to have it altered to fit. From the seamstress she gets a casual lead on the city's grain.
The grain station is a former Thaylen bank with *Secure Keeps* lettered above its door in Thaylen glyphs alongside the women's script. The moneylenders have run, as moneylenders always do at the first scent of trouble, and Velalant's soldiers have appropriated the vaults to dole out a day's flatbread and gruel. The queue is the only orderly thing in the square. Veil sits on a low wall by a drainage trough and shares one of her sugar-flavoured meat sticks with an urchin whose hand is twisted into useless nubs. *Why not get in line?* Because they have rules, the boy says; you have to be old enough, and if you look too poor they push you out and pretend you've already collected. Watching the line, she begins to count the well-fed servants and conspicuously lean off-duty bodyguards moving through it — the line is really feeding the wealthy houses. Either Velalant's men are spectacularly incompetent or Velalant is buying his lighteyed neighbours' allegiance and waiting to see which way the city's winds turn.
She remembers the row of corpses she found beneath the palace — Adolin and Elhokar have identified one of them as Kaves, a distant Kholin cousin who had always angled for power in the city; neither was sorry to hear it. But more than thirty went up to meet Aesudan, and most more important than Kaves. What happened to the others?
The market mood darkens around her. The handout ends; people cry out in despair; the soldiers tell them to come back in the evening. Angerspren boil up — some in their familiar pools of blood, others pitch-black and ember-eyed, distorted by whatever holds Kholinar — and subside into exhaustionspren as the crowd settles to wait. Why does any of this matter, she thinks, when Voidbringers are coming to tear the city apart? Infiltrating a cult feels too abstract; she wants to *do* something. Then again, she could not even save her own family. She does not let herself think about what Mraize has done with her brothers.
She is pushing through the crowd looking for air when a voice stops her — a voice she could not possibly mistake. *You say that, my dear man,* it is proclaiming, *but everyone thinks themselves expert on the moons.* She drifts toward it through the press. On a low wall enclosing a storm cistern sits a man in Sadeas livery coat open at the front, a bright scarf at his neck: black hair, sharp-angled face, blue eyes. The King's Wit — *the traveler* she had met before, the one who had changed everything — here, in besieged Kholinar.
He launches into a tale that is part performance and part conjuring. A small brazier in front of him spouts threads of coloured smoke, which he shapes with his hands into the figures of his story while passersby drift up and settle in to listen. The story is of Mishim, the most cunning of the three moons, who craves a taste of the mortal world below and finally tricks the great architect-queen Tsa of Natanatan into a wager: that for one night the queen will rise into the sky to inspect a tower-roof flaw Mishim has invented, while Mishim takes Tsa's place below. The smoke shapes a tower; then a city; then a green moon ringing the city's top; then four colours swirling into a single white moon as queen and goddess change places. Mishim spends her one mortal night drinking, courting, dancing, and singing — and forgets, in the rush, to come back.
When Nomon and Salas rise the next nights without ever calling Mishim out, Mishim begins to panic — *the mortals have an emotion for this. Loss.* The queen returns at last. Mishim climbs back into the sky. Months later, passing Tsa's tower, Mishim sees the queen holding an infant boy with skin faintly blue — the cleverest of moons has been tricked by a clever mortal. Tsa had wanted only the one night to lie with Nomon and bear a son of the heavens for her people. *And that is why,* Wit tells the crowd, *to this day the Natans are born with skin tinted faintly blue, and why Mishim has never since dared leave the sky. And how the moon learned the one thing only mortals had known before.* Mid-story, his blue eyes settle on Shallan in the crowd, and his smile turns sly — he has recognised her even through Veil's face. She does not know how.
He sits when he finishes, exhausted. The audience pleads for another, then curses him when he gives them nothing, and slowly drifts away. Only Shallan is left. *Why that story? Why now?* He never gives meanings, he tells her; he only tells the tales. Then: *I miss my flute.* He stands and begins packing up, and as she peers into his pack she catches sight of a small sealed jar — mostly black, but on the side toward her, white. He snaps the pack closed. *Come,* he says. *You look like someone who could use the chance to buy me a meal.*