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Navani watches the Roshar map bloom into the meeting chamber — Shallan's exhale of Stormlight spinning out in a disc that meets Dalinar's, the two breaths braiding into a continent rendered in topographical color and full to scale. The Mink's reflex is to dart for the door, then to step inside the illusion and reach a hand into the foothills — distorting them briefly before they snap back to shape. Dalinar demonstrates the zoom that takes them down to Azimir at sphere-sized buildings, then has Shallan fill the air with glowing troop counts: gold for singer estimates, princedom colors for their own, broken down by foot, heavy, archers, cavalry.

Jasnah arrives — guards dropped at the threshold, only the Queen's Wit kept close — and asks the Mink for his thoughts. They walk him through the two fronts. In Emul, the coalition's forces have pushed singer lines back in the north but cannot advance further south without grazing the army of god-priest Tezim, known now to be the mad Herald Ishar. The other front is the long, raid-bled border between captured Alethkar and Jah Keved, where the Fused refuse pitched battle and the terrain favors melts-into-the-hills warfare. Dalinar wants the great offensive to be into Alethkar — back toward Kholinar — and asks the Mink to see what they see.

The Mink reads the disposition in front of him in seconds and asks the cruel question. Why are coalition troops massed *here* and *here* near the southern Alethi coast, not on the river opposite the enemy concentrations? Because they don't trust the man at their back. Dalinar admits it. He believes Taravangian is working for the enemy, and is certain Taravangian's Radiant was the one who let the Fused into Urithiru a year ago. Jasnah adds: a whole Radiant order, the Skybreakers, have gone to Odium, harrying Azir continuously; the Dustbringers still flirt with rebellion.

The Mink tells them the truth they have flinched from. They must not march on Alethkar — not now, not on a two-front war with a probable traitor in their lines and the enemy's footing too sure in the captured homeland. Instead they should consolidate at the enemy's weakest pinch: drive the singers out of Emul entirely, where they sit landlocked and pinned, and use the Skybreaker activity as the giveaway it is. Dalinar visibly deflates; Navani reads in his bowed shoulders that he has known this for some time, perhaps needed to hear it from a man who could not be flattered into agreement. Jasnah sets the Mink up with Teshav, the archive maps and the military scribes, and dispatches Adolin and Shallan to escort him.

With only family — and Wit, who walks at Jasnah's shoulder as a matter of right — Jasnah takes off her queen, sits at the small table, and reopens the proposal she had floated before Dalinar left for Hearthstone. She intends to abolish slavery across Alethkar in a single sweeping decree. Dalinar forbids it; Jasnah notes mildly that she was not aware he could forbid the queen. She has no intention of debating *whether* she does it, only of canvassing the highprinces' objections so she can answer them. When her uncle protests the social chaos, she reminds him that this is precisely the moment to do it — while everything is already in motion — and that she seeks the line of action that does the most possible good for the most people. Visible disagreement between them, she adds, would help her: it would dissolve the lingering scent of *highking* and prove she is no Blackthorn pawn. Navani asks about the ardents; Jasnah is happy to free them too, even at the price of letting the church back into public politics, where its actions will at least be visible.

Wit returns leading two figures who, glanced at, are simply a Makabaki woman with Shin features and a tall, vacant-eyed man she has to lead by the elbow. They are Shalash and Talenelat — Heralds, gods to Navani's faith, and both quite plainly mad. Wit treats them with a reverence Navani has not seen from him before. Ash tells them again, with bad grace, what she already told Jasnah last interview: she does not know what Bondsmiths do. That was Ishar's purview, and her father humored him about Realmatic Theory while she had no interest. The Oathpact was his work, the rest of them just went along. Braize is no other realm, only a planet visible in the sky alongside Ashyn — humankind's *Tranquiline Halls*. The Oathpact is broken, her father killed permanently a year ago; they all felt it; there is nothing the Heralds can do for Navani now.

But Jasnah has another reason to want Azir and the Makabaki states secured. Beyond them lie the Shin — the Honorblade-holders, the only people on Roshar who have practiced with Surgebinding for centuries — and eventually the coalition will need to deal with them, if for no other reason than to learn what Bondsmiths could do in the old days. Ash confirms that the Shin are dangerous — they once tried to kill her, and worse, they ended up worshipping her — and that they had old prophecies about *the coming of this Return*. The Emul offensive, Jasnah tells Dalinar, buys them that road. She also announces she intends to attend the offensive in person. Dalinar grunts, asks Ash to keep talking about the Shin who might know more about his powers, and the meeting moves on.