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Seven years before Kal runs the bridges, Navani Kholin is keeping the Kholinar palace from coming apart at the seams. The visiting parshmen her husband has invited to sign a treaty have brought drums; Gavilar told them yes and forgot to tell anyone else. Maratham is already past the edge of panic in the kitchens. Navani moves the king's high table and the drummers upstairs to a second feast in the ballroom, prises emergency grain out of Brightlord Amaram's stores, parcels out the loitering guards as extra setup labor, and walks out into the gardens to keep her own breathing in order.

There she finds her daughter-in-law Aesudan in a pillar of gemstone-lit hair, chatting near the fountains with two elderly ardents she has decided are tedious. One of them is Rushur Kris — the artist, the master artifabrian — holding a small flowered box that might be one of his new heating devices. Aesudan tows Navani away before she can engage him, complains that Gavilar dumped the ardents on Elhokar and then abandoned him, and then peels off into the higher company without her husband as an excuse. Navani swallows the fury — that her husband would invite one of Roshar's great artifabrians to her city without telling her — and answers the next crisis: out of two wines, because Dalinar has discovered the cellar again. She scribbles a note unlocking her private store at the monastery and turns to the next problem after that, and the next.

The grand entryway is full of guests being entertained while the feast finishes — and full of people promised an audience with the king who is not present. She apologises in Gavilar's name, reviews Gavilar's maps for Highlord Rine Hatham, asks after families and axehounds, and acts like a queen. Underneath it she is the country girl in someone else's clothing; the insecurities have been louder of late. She spots Adolin charming a circle of young women with Renarin gangly beside him, Elhokar presiding over the pre-feast, Aesudan for once chatting with her own husband, and then Dalinar — taller than any other man in the room, not yet drunk, people orbiting him like a fire. She excuses herself upstairs to get away from him.

Gavilar is not where he is supposed to be either. Navani threads the dim upper halls past parshmen carrying drums in a language she does not speak, hears voices, and finds the king holding court in her own study with two strangers — a tall Makabaki with a birthmark on one cheek and a younger Vorin man fidgeting with his hair. On the table between them is a scatter of spheres and a few gemstones whose light is the wrong colour — small pits of violet darkness that pull at the room around them. Gavilar is talking about Braize and a *Connection* not severed and a box that lets a being travel back and forth. The Vorin man wants out; he calls the Makabaki *Nale*, and Nale tells Gavilar flatly that they will not speak again. Nale and his nervous companion leave.

Navani snatches one of the strange spheres off the table. Gavilar holds out his hand for it and tells her this does not concern her — return to the feast. The argument escalates into the worst they have ever had. He prises her fingers open and takes the sphere back. He throws at her every shape of accusation he has been saving: that she pretends to be a scholar but discovers nothing; that she is a thing that destroys light, not one that studies it; that she chose him over Dalinar because he was the more powerful brother. She cannot, in the moment, say all of it is a lie. She tells him she could write his life; she has a grip on the legacy he loves most; if he keeps pushing her she will start squeezing. He answers, calmly, that he has found the entrance to the realm of gods and legends, and once he joins them his kingdom will never end — and leaves.

Alone at her desk, shaking, Navani paints out the most meticulous glyphward of her life. It reads, in three measured strokes on the shapes of his own heraldry: *Death. Gift. Death.* She burns it in the lamp. The flare is bright and her catharsis turns instantly into shame; shamespren burst around her like white and red petals. She composes herself, redoes her makeup and hair, and goes back down. *If a man like that can pretend to be a king, I can pretend to be a queen.*

She does not hear of the assassination until it is done. At the doors she farewells guests in Gavilar's name, implying he is only tired, until Gereh the steward — a man whose name she rarely uses — takes her arm and weeps that the king is dead, killed by the parshmen he had befriended. She refuses to believe it until they walk her down to the larder where his body lies in shattered Shardplate on a table, blood in his beard. Jasnah is in the corner, fist to her mouth, crying. The shockspren come for Navani only then. Sadeas takes her aside and explains his part with apparently genuine sorrow; the Parshendi slipped out of the city in secret in the moments before the kill, leaving their leaders to mask the withdrawal.

Standing again over the body, what she feels is not grief. Regret — that their last conversation was that one. Pity — that the man who claimed eternity has been left bleeding on a table by his own grand plans. And the cold knife of having prayed for this only hours ago. She closes his eyes. *I will be the better person, Gavilar. For what you once were, I'll let the world pretend. I'll give you your legacy.*

Then she catches herself. His Plate has broken near the waist and the pouch of strange spheres he had been showing off is still in his pocket — empty. She does not know where he has hidden them. To cover the search, she takes the spheres out of her hair, puts them into the empty pouch, and folds it into his hand: as if a widow were returning her light to a husband whose own is going out. Over the next hours she organises a city on its head and worries she will be remembered as callous; people seem instead to find her steadiness comforting. The king is gone. The kingdom is not. Gavilar has left life as he lived it, with grand drama, and Navani has been left to pick up the pieces.