POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan is on the fourth day of the Shadesmar voyage and, except for one distant pair of Fused sighted three days back, the trip has been a holiday of drawing on deck. Today she is trying to sketch Ua'pam standing in an explorer's pose at the rail, and all four Cryptics of the Unseen Court have crowded around her to watch: Pattern, plus Mosaic (sharp-angled, Vathah's), Motif (clicking, Ishnah's), and Ornament (lace-fine, squeaky, Beryl's). The press of them is too much. She asks for room; they step exactly one pace back and then lean in further. The chittering and the slap of beads against the hull start to feel like thousands of Cryptics watching her at once, and Radiant quietly takes over and walks her to the stern until Shallan can come back out.
Shallan decides it is finally time to turn to the spy hunt. Veil refuses to run it herself. As a kind of penance for having overridden the compact to enroll the extra agents, Veil insists on coaching Shallan through *a little espionage*. They first satisfy themselves that the cube hasn't shifted on its own inside the trunk — tipped each way, it barely moves — and that none of the Three were responsible. Someone among the agents really is using it. Veil outlines two methods: rattle each suspect into confessing something they're guilty about, and, failing that, plant a different distinctive false tidbit on each so that whichever one reaches Mraize names the leaker.
Pattern catches Shallan as she leaves the tent to apologise for his fellow Cryptics and to brag that he is famous among them — he had gone into the cities of other spren to watch humans, in preparation for their order's return to bonding. He insists that art is math; she insists it is not.
First target: Ishnah, helping Ua'pam and his cousin Unativi manifest cargo at the stern. Ua'pam pulls in Stormlight from a diamond chip and grows an ornate wooden table out of a bead; Unativi applauds and openly defers to his cousin as the better at it. Shallan joins Ishnah at the rail, hints darkly that there are currents she ought to feel ashamed of, and lets the silence do the work. Ishnah cracks — but the wrong fish: she confesses to having been quietly funneling her stipend to her old crew, telling herself it was helping them out of that life, only to learn they had set up protection rackets and gambling dens under her name. She cut them off last month. When Shallan floats Mraize's name as a probe, Ishnah's shock looks genuine. Shallan eases off, comforts her, and seeds the test tidbit: she thinks she has seen a corrupted windspren, and asks Ishnah to watch quietly for odd spren.
Next: Beryl, on Soulcasting duty with chunks of obsidian quarried from a strip of riverbank the day before. Beryl shows off a trick — pressing literal seeds to the stone — that lets her cast individual grains of lavis, something most can't do. She wonders aloud whether Jasnah's training method is simply wrong for Lightweavers. Shallan tries to push for hidden pain and instead asks if she is genuinely happy; Beryl answers, mildly, that she had been a courtesan, and the real revelation of Shallan's arrival was that she could have walked away months earlier. The chapter quietly notes that Cryptics arriving with the Lightweavers — the order of artists, who cannot lie well — fits in a way Shallan hadn't considered, and that Beryl's contentment unsettles her where guilt would not have. Something inside Shallan — Formless — stirs. She whispers *help*, Radiant snaps to attention in her place, sets Beryl the task of teaching her seed method to Ishnah, and rather bluntly plants the second seeded tidbit: a *corrupted gloryspren*, watch for it, don't tell the others.
Third: Vathah at the bow, hand-over-handing a thirty-foot pole through a ring in the prow to sound the bead-bottom of the *Radiant Depths*. Radiant follows him to the water-station and watches him scrub the deck on his knees — *deck needs to be done* — and is surprised enough by it to grab a brush herself. Vathah reads her immediately and asks what she actually wants. Radiant catches herself one breath short of asking him plainly whether he is the spy; Shallan sighs back in and changes the subject to belonging. Vathah lets the silence sit, then asks whether her three faces actually help, and admits that learning to Lightweave is, for him, the hope of becoming someone else — a chance to stop being the soldier with a child's blood on his boots. Shallan flinches at the cut and seeds the third tidbit: a corrupted *fearspren* swimming alongside the barge, her colour, don't trouble the others.
She lets him go with a couple of bad rock jokes that earn a real *thanks for smiling*. As she walks away, Veil presses: she is figuring out why Shallan keeps working with Mraize, why she won't tell Adolin, what the conversation with Beryl really stirred. *Not now,* Shallan says, and retreats; Radiant finds herself in control, and no amount of prodding will bring Shallan back.