POV: shallan
Summary
The morning after the wedding party Shallan burns off Veil's hangover with Stormlight and headache herbs, sits through accounts and minister meetings as wife to a highprince holding a tenth of Urithiru, and at last finds herself alone with nothing to play at. She reads her correspondence and stops cold at one spanreed line that arrived while she was away — *The deal is set and arranged. The spren will come.* — and burns it.
She goes to her brothers' rooms a few corridors over. Jushu is alone, lets her in, chats about the mission. She settles by the heating-fabrial hearth with her sketchbook and lets herself half-imagine she is back in Jah Keved, her father behaving for visiting ardents, all four brothers still alive. Creationspren gather, taking the shapes of objects from home — and one, a chain-necklace slinking across the floor, chills her. She opens her eyes; the sketch shows the home hearth, but with four burning souls inside it that look very much like herself and her brothers. Jushu says something is weird about it. She snaps the book shut.
She is eleven when she killed her mother, seven years gone — and if she has the timeline right she was already seeing Pattern then, long before Jasnah found her own spren, only she has excised the memories. *They're here,* Veil tells her. *Deep within.* She doesn't want them. As she shies away, Formless stirs inside her, growing stronger. She tells herself again she has stabilised, that everything is getting better.
Balat comes home with Eylita and a fellow guardsman; the three head for the balcony with the chilled curries. Shallan half-listens, working through Ialai's little notebook. Ialai's spies had heard Ghostblood talk of a new route through the Sea of Lost Lights and copied a crude map of Shadesmar from a captured operative — three full pages of places in the world of the spren. Veil surfaces to think; the colour drains out of Shallan's perception of the room. The Oathgates also send people into Shadesmar, she remembers: was that always what Mraize wanted? Then she hears the guardsman's voice on the balcony.
It is Mraize — wearing Sebarial gold-and-black like Balat, calling himself Gobby, the clumsy new recruit who nearly took a man's arm off last week. He laughs with her brothers, makes a show of seeing her for the first time, bows overdone, and excuses himself. The warning is plain: he brought the brothers here as her reward for service, and accidents happen on training fields. Radiant agrees they need a safer place to put the boys; Veil agrees this game is now played with people she loves.
She goes down to the so-called garden under the balcony — really a network of stunted shalebark mounds — and meets him there under the illusion of a Sebarial guard. He congratulates her on the Sons of Honor's collapse and confirms a Ghostblood operative killed Ialai. He won't say who: only that the killer is among her own Lightweavers — Lightweavers fascinate him, and people kept close to her can be an aid in times of need, as Iyatil once was for him. She fumes.
He holds up a glowing diamond broam — *power: portable, easily contained, renewable* — and at Veil's blunt push back about gemstones being cheap, gives the real frame. The stones are cups; the value is what they hold. Get Stormlight to other places — Nalthis, Scadrial — and you carry the heart of a storm into worlds that have nothing like it. Radiant takes over for the harder question — the catch — and Mraize gives her Investiture: the underlying name of Stormlight and every god's power, bound by Connection to its place. People too heavily Invested are bound the same way — Radiants and spren cannot go farther than Ashyn or Braize. He claims to have unravelled the secret. He has a job.
He also has the secret she actually wants. No — Gavilar. The old king had carried Voidlight from Braize before the Everstorm and was testing the movement of Light between worlds, chasing Herald-like immortality and a deeper secret only Restares still living shared. That is why the Sons of Honor had to fall, and that is what she must now go fetch. Restares has asylum in Lasting Integrity, the honorspren capital in Shadesmar — somewhere no Ghostblood has been able to enter, but where she and her own just might. The reward, on completion, is every answer he has: about the world, the Radiants, the cosmere — and about her and her own past.
*Find a reason to visit the honorspren,* he tells her, and throws his hunting chicken — green, hook-beaked, like nothing else she has ever drawn — off after another hunt. Shallan walks away knowing he has her hooked. There are holes in her childhood she has been afraid to fill, and Mraize is offering to fill them. Maybe then, at last, Veil could force her to become whole.