POV: shallan
Summary
Veil makes her morning round of the market. Grund is alone in his shop now — the other beggars have shifted to a tinker's place down the street, leaving him room enough to move without kicking anyone — and takes today's parcel, fruit included, with the wary reserve of someone waiting for the shoe to drop. Muri gets the next package, with her usual ration of useless gossip. By midmorning Veil drops the last bag in an old beggar's lap, and the beggar nudges his neighbour: *the Swiftspren!* The Swiftspren, he tells her cheerfully, robs the rich all over Kholinar, can walk through walls, never appears the same way twice. The legend is doing its job. She has been amplifying it by sending Ishnah and Vathah out wearing Veil's face in parallel.
Pattern hums on her coat and asks her why so few mouths matter so much. She bats him off — *because we can.* He keeps pressing, drowsy and frank: she lies, her lies wrap other lies, she should remember the Ideal she has already spoken. She tells him to call her Veil and shoves her hands in her pockets. The truth gnaws anyway. Feeding Kholinar's urchins feels more real to her than the actual mission — the Oathgate, the cult, the city slipping under — and she knows what Jasnah would tell her: *too small. You are thinking too small.* It is the sort of small that drips a thimble of water onto a bonfire.
She drifts at an intersection until torchlight pulls her down a side street. A Cult of Moments procession is moving through, the cultists wrapped in spren costumes, chanting *our time has passed, the spren have come, give them our sins.* She pulls off her hat, breathes in Stormlight, and steps through her own exhalation in a costume from her old Plains notebook — Swiftspren, the glowing arrowhead spren that weaves around skyeels: face wrapped, golden tassels streaming from her back, body trailing cloth. The cultists let her in. She walks among their chant and *lets* it soak through her, and for several beats it is the most peaceful thing she has ever felt — the easy surrender of *embrace the end* — and underneath it a voice she did not invite: *Surrender. Give me your passion. Your pain. Your love. Give up your guilt. Embrace the end.* And then, oddly intimate: *Shallan, I'm not your enemy.* That last lands like a scar on a fine face. She comes back to herself in horror at how easily she had gone in.
The procession has halted; her illusory tassels are still streaming on no wind. Corrupted awespren — soot-black, wrong — burst over the cultists. She uses it. *There are spren, and there are spren,* she announces, voice warped by Lightweaving. *You have followed the dark ones. They lie. Strip off these costumes and go home to your families.* When they do not move quickly enough she sends her tassels curling up overhead and flares with light. They scatter. She lets the glow die, walks off into a shadow, and emerges as Veil — shaken at how close she came to the easy answer. Jasnah would have stayed under and ridden the procession all the way up to the platform.
She wanders away through the markets, arms around herself. Truth, the part she has been ducking: she enjoys the thievery and the giveaways. Veil wants to be a hero out of an old story; that has corrupted Shallan enough to stall the harder, more logical plan. She catches herself wanting to track down Kaladin in the Wall Guard and *flirt a little* — he wouldn't know her, and could she not just *get to know him* — and her unnamed Radiant self, the one shaped by her training-bond with Adolin, is appalled. *And Shallan — what does Shallan want again?* The question slides off the table.
Light pulls her again, this time wholesome — sphere glow and the impossible sound of laughter. She finds a ring of Kholinar citizens singing under Nomon's blue light, with Wit himself leading from atop an overturned box. The innkeeper, she remembers, has been complaining that Wit moved out and stuck him with the tab. She watches from the wall for a long moment without approaching, then turns away into the dark. Back at the tailor's shop she layers a Lightwoven havah over her trousers and walks past Drehy and Skar debating chouta varieties.
In the kitchen she finds Elhokar alone in red-violet light from a sphere dropped into his cup of wine, tallying loyal houses and the fifty-or-so armsmen each might still field. He asks after the Oathgate platform; she promises a few more days. He confesses, almost shyly, that there are not many people left to whom he can still be a hero — this city, his three-year-old son locked in the palace. She fetches her pad and draws him from the inside out: kneeling, ragged, but chin up — noble, regal. *Is that what I look like?* he whispers. *Yes,* she lies, lacquers the page, hands it to him, and bolts. Upstairs Ishnah, grinning, holds out a folded slip. *Someone handed me this today, Brightness.* The note: *Meet us at the borders of the revel in two nights, the day of the next Everstorm. Come alone. Bring food. Join the feast.*