POV: adolin
Summary
Adolin hears the watchpost call land — finally — and pats Gallant in shared relief. He has hated the boat. *A ship was a cage without bars.* He climbs to the prow as a strip of obsidian and candle-lit windows resolves out of the bead-sea, and reins in the others' eagerness to disembark: the last time he was in Shadesmar the first town they entered was held by Fused, so Shallan and Vathah will scout first under illusion. Ua'pam promises the place is free of honorspren and Fused both; Adolin insists anyway. The humans gather their horses and pile into the tarp enclosure, where Godeke holds up a fading amethyst broam and notes that the gemstones they brought will not last to Lasting Integrity — they had argued the Stormlight budget a dozen times leading up to this and there had been no way around it.
Shallan rolls out of her bedroll hungover from a Thaylen violet Adolin had brought up last night, dons a cultivationspren face, and goes ashore with Vathah in similar disguise. While they're gone, Adolin checks on Maya in her nook at the rear, talks to her a little, and falls into a slow longsword kata Zahel had taught him — a hallway-fighting pattern, no flourishes — using the longsword as a poor stand-in for a Shardblade. Maya rises, inspects the sword with her head cocked, and falls in beside him with empty hands, mirroring every thrust and reset, her form clean enough that not even Zahel would have corrected her stance. Conversation around the tarp dies; soldiers and spren watch. Afterward Ua'pam walks up with light pouring from the cracks in his skin and demands to know how Adolin is doing this. She is a deadeye, her mind broken thousands of years ago, and spren do not simply *wear off* death. Adolin points back at him — spren were never going to bond humans again, either, and yet here they were. Words like *eternal* are not as final as they pretend.
Shallan returns with her illusion dismissed and the all-clear: caravans pass through here regularly, humans aren't unusual, they only need to say they are traders. The envoy disembarks in groups, with Adolin's standing order to stay together and stay out of trouble.
Hungover still, Shallan argues with the Three about who gets blamed for the wine, then — with Adolin ashore — engineers herself the first solitude of the trip. Veil pulls her hat on so Adolin knows who he is talking to, sends him off with a poke that he is *sounding like his father*, and tells Unativi all his sailors may go into town — she will watch the barge alone. Unativi laughs that as a Radiant she is the better guard anyway, and herds his crew off. Of course Pattern is still there. He cheerfully asks whether she is about to contact Mraize; she sets him at the open front of the tarp as lookout and admits she would actually like his ear on the conversation. Veil unlocks the trunk — and lets Shallan take over long enough to confirm it: the cube has been moved again, the second time, on the night she had been drunk. She picks it up, asks him aloud how to activate it — *I need to speak to Mraize* — and the corners of the cube begin to shine.
Ashore, Adolin keeps to his own rules and stays in the loose cluster of soldiers and scribe through the four-street market, Maya at his elbow. He is uncharacteristically weighed down — the failure at Kholinar is sitting in him, and he needs this mission with the honorspren to land. The market itself is wonderful: cultivationspren shopkeepers calling in Azish and Alethi; a procession of ashspren whose flesh crumbles off in clouds; a pair of highspren like person-shaped tears in reality; one peakspren in a Veden coat over a Tashikki wrap that should have been garish and somehow wasn't; manifested swords in barrels because in Shadesmar a sword costs no more Stormlight to make than a brick.
He sees Godeke hurrying up the street, fluid and worried — not another deadeye spren, he hopes, but no. *It's the humans.* A small caravan of brown-skinned, black-haired humans is camped outside the town, no pack animals, weapons cudgels in plain sight and edged blades concealed among the goods. Adolin pegs the clothing as southeastern Makabaki — Marat or Tukar — and confirms the Tukari accent when one of the men curtly tells him to go away. The shadows on their faces lie wrong in the Shadesmar light; their eyes are pits. Godeke suggests they could simply be travellers; Archinal, his spren, reminds him not to assume earthly geography maps onto this side. But Adolin doesn't believe it. There is no easy way for a caravan from his world to be here — crossing into Shadesmar requires a Radiant — and the Tukari are led by a man claiming to be a god who is actually a Herald. His father is planning to crush them between the Emul advance and that border. Coincidence felt unlikely.
Walking back toward the barge, the chapter ends as it began — with an unwanted recognition. A figure of white tinted blue is speaking with Unativi at the dock: tall, distinguished, in a buttoned shirt and trousers rather than a captain's uniform. Adolin knows him. It is Notum. The confrontation with the honorspren is going to begin earlier than planned.