POV: shallan
Summary
Veil comes off the Oathgate platform too rattled to go straight home and report. She sent Vathah back to brief Elhokar and took the last two food sacks down into the Kholinar market herself — anything to keep her hands busy. Monsters and Unmade she cannot do anything about; starving children she can.
Grund's corner of the broken shop is empty when she arrives. The roof has sagged further under the Everstorm, and tree branches have been blown in through the window. She calls and is about to leave when he stumbles in, malformed hand pocketed, scowling at her where he used to grin. He stuffs his good hand out for the flatbread she hands him and asks, too quickly, what she needs next. *Nothing right now.* *Come on. There has to be something you want, right?* Pattern hums softly on her coat. *Too desperate*, she thinks. She tells him she'll be back in a few days with a bigger haul, tips her hat, and steps out into the market — but she keeps her eyes on him.
In the alley she does her face with a wave of her fingers, Lightweaves her hat into a waterskin under her arm, tucks her hair into her coat, then sheds the coat altogether as a market guard she once sketched. She circles back to Grund's window and listens. *Told you we shouldn't have given her the book.* *This is pathetic. That was the best you could do?* A grunt. A whimper. Grund. She rounds to the door; the men inside scatter at her shout, but one swings a cudgel onto Grund's head as he goes. Angerspren pool around her boots in red and orange. By the time she reaches him the Grips are out the back. She summons Pattern as a Blade and dismisses him again — she cannot leave the boy. The wound in his skull is bleeding into the dust.
She kneels and tries to staunch it with strips of her shirt. *V… Veil?* *Storms, Grund, I…* She calls for help out the window. He whispers something. She bends close. *Hate you.* *It's all right. They're gone.* *Hate you.* *It's me, Grund. Not those others.* *Why couldn't you leave me alone?* he says. *They killed them all. My friends. Tai…* She presses the cloth against his head. *Quiet. Don't exert yourself.* *Hate you.* He has been sitting in the broken shop every day waiting for her — and if he was not there when she came, or if he tried to hide the food, the Grips beat him. Since the very first day. *Others too. We all… hate you.* She sits with him until his breathing stops.
Shallan — not Veil now — comes up through her eyes in tears. Pattern reminds her that the boy spoke of others. She runs. She drops Veil's hat and coat in the doorway, shoves through the market, and reaches the tenement where Muri the seamstress lives. Muri is alive — packing, with her eldest daughter clutching a similar sack — and she looks up at Shallan still wearing Veil's face and curses. *You.* The frown lines are unfamiliar; Muri has always seemed so pleasant. *How oblivious are you, woman?* The gang has been watching her too, waiting for her next visit; tonight a watcher went and met another and they argued, and she heard her name. She is not going to wait around for them to come back. She tells Shallan flatly that yes, the Grips take the food, and yes, they killed Grund — *poor kid; better him than mine.* *We always had to sit here, waiting for you and your storming sack of goodies.* She gathers her children and leaves into the night. Shallan sinks down in Muri's emptied room, the bloody cloth still in her hand.