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Veil expected the craftsman she had read about; she finds Ialai Sadeas hollow-cheeked and withered, an empty cup in her hand, a too-fashionable dress hanging on her like a coat on a hook. *So you've finally come for me*, she says, and the Three balk. Radiant refuses the kill; Veil holds the bow Ialai has left her standing in; Shallan says *get her talking*. The pretence breaks fast — Ialai declines the title queen, names Elhokar's six-year-old son Gavinor as the *rightful king* she would shepherd against Dalinar and Jasnah the usurpers, then pours wine.

She makes the conversation the wines. A clear simberry vintage for the secret she suspects beneath Veil's skin (*peel away the skin and what is left is the truth of the fruit*), a pale orange for the false strength of her caller, a deep blue she calls the last of its kind for herself. Veil tries to bait an exchange — a Kholin schematic for the name of Ialai's spy — and gets cut. Ialai is not negotiating. She is identifying the visitor: *Thanadal dead the moment he came in to negotiate; Vamah run down after the night flight.* That is when Shallan understands she has been speaking in the wrong voice all along — Ialai takes her for a knife sent by Mraize, not by Dalinar, and the Ghostbloods killed Thanadal and Vamah without anyone in the Kholin camp ever giving the order. Ialai offers a parting promise — that they will send Veil after Restares next, then watch her, and that Restares is only one name in a much larger map; Gavilar had seen *entire worlds*. Veil finally summons her Blade in earnest — Pattern arrives back in her head, perky and confused — and Ialai closes her eyes for the cut. The Three vote and dismiss the Blade instead. They will not be Mraize's. Adolin, wearing the Lightweaving face Shallan put on him, kicks the door in with five of her agents and his soldiers. *Look for the rarest vintage,* Ialai hisses as she is bound and disguised under a kindly kitchen-woman face. *It is exotic.*

Outside the burning manor, Kaladin lands on a soft Lashing and faces the horned Fused in the breach with five singer soldiers and a wounded Godeke as bait. Syl calls it a trap and is right. Inside his father's old dining room — where Lirin and Roshone once argued over thieves — the fifth soldier twists the gemstone on a small four-garnet device, deep violet-black light dims to nothing, and Kaladin's Lashings cancel. Syl puffs to spren; he cannot resummon. He kills four soldiers without his powers anyway — taking a spear from the first man, gutting two, spearing a fourth in the neck — and then waits for the teleporting Fused to come at his back as a red-violet ribbon. He meets it with a thrown knife driven into the gap of throat-carapace. The hulking body topples without a returning ribbon: caught before he teleports, the creature dies for real, at least until the next Everstorm. Lift, who has slipped in unseen, drags Godeke clear and then kills the device so the Radiants' powers return. Kaladin makes the surviving soldier promise — on threat of being Lashed into a very long fall — never to return, and sends Lift to deliver Godeke to safety and the device to Navani. Roshone, Lift reports, came in with Godeke and was not carried out with him.

In the room with the dead, Shallan strips her Lightweaving off the corpse and one of Adolin's soldiers confirms a pulse-less wrist. *Nale's nuts,* a soldier mutters; another Sadeas body, and the Blackthorn did not want this. Vathah names the foam at her mouth blackbane and recalls a smuggler officer who died the same way in the old days. Ishnah cannot say she saw Ialai take it. Adolin sets gags on the surviving conspirators and sets his men to comb the rest of the fortress, but Shallan insists she will go through Ialai's rooms herself — she knows what to watch for, and she now suspects one of Adolin's hand-picked soldiers or one of her own agents is the second Ghostblood knife. Eating blackbane is slow, Ishnah tells her in private; a pinprick is fast. Ialai died fast.

Shallan sets Gaz and Red sweeping the bedchamber for letters and notebooks they were always going to find — the obvious haul Ialai would have expected anyone to lift. While they work she walks the bare understated room — bare feet on the thick rug, the strange scrollwork ringing the ceiling — and lights on the wines as the actual clue. The hutch holds no hidden compartments; the room is more deliberate than it looks, fortress masquerading as ordinary chamber. Ialai's real bequest is somewhere Mraize does not want her to be holding the key to — and Shallan means to find it before the soldiers ransack a single drawer.