POV: shallan
Summary
Veil sits with Shallan's sketchbook open against a boulder, doing the worst job sketching she can manage to coax Shallan out — without success — while Adolin holds council at the cold-burning Shadesmar fire with Arshqqam, Godeke, and Zu. The fire is a flicker trapped in a bead and gives no real heat. Adolin stands sharp in black and silver. The Old Truthwatcher — interpreting through her spren, who has read Dalinar and Jasnah's letters and summarised them for her — tells him bluntly that none of his proposals is strong enough: threatening to defect to the inkspren will not work because the honorspren know how thin that recruitment is; guilt will not work because they do not feel any. Godeke agrees that neither guilt nor threat can carry it — their only honest case is to ask, plainly, as supplicants in need. Zu shrugs that she is not one for politics and will simply call them storming stupid; her own people, she adds with another shrug, are storming stupid too.
Radiant surfaces just enough to pull Beryl — sitting back from the fire in a flowing classical dress with both hands in long sleeves — into the conversation. *It's not her,* Veil decides as Beryl flushes and demurs. Radiant tells her she only needs practice giving an opinion where it is safe to fail, and Beryl bows away gratefully. Arshqqam gives Adolin the council's real takeaway: how do you appeal to their honor? They are spren of that attribute; any success will come through it. Radiant feels the rightness of that — Jasnah's lofty arguments aim there but read like scholar's prose, not a soldier's.
Adolin dismisses the council, takes a fresh report on the Tukari who are still pacing them, and walks back to Radiant under the rock. Cards close her sketchpad — Veil's drawings are not for showing. He has a ration bar for her and proposes a walk. Veil comes back forward for the conversation.
They leave camp and almost immediately meet Notum riding up on the most graceful spren Shallan has ever seen — almost a horse, but with a neck no spine could make, no mouth, hair waving in a phantom wind, controlled by a simple twisted-thread bridle. He has to turn south here; he is forbidden to approach Lasting Integrity and will patrol the coast. He refuses Adolin's latest invitation to join them. *If I don't see you after you're turned away,* he says, *give my best to the Ancient Daughter; it is well that she is not trapped in the stronghold — it would not suit her.* When Adolin asks about the spren's horse-shape, Notum smiles, gestures at himself, and notes only that not all spren were imagined by men. He rides on. *He's cold, and he's one of the spren who like us,* Adolin says, deflated. Veil suggests sneaking into the fortress if they are turned away. He thinks his father will only see results, never journey. She thinks privately that he has an unrealistic view of Dalinar — but argues with him won't help.
He leads her along a hollow in the obsidian to a ridge Ua'pam had told him about. The plants here grow like coloured frost, sturdy as glass cones, with smoke-shadow spren peeking out under metallic leaves. Shallan begins to stir at the landscape. Adolin takes her hand to help her up; his touch is, she thinks, a flame never extinguished, and the only smoke is in his eyes. They reach the rise. Then the cloud overhead churns and a starspren surfaces — an ashen-carapaced thing with a long chasmfiend neck and seven sets of insect wings, trailing cloud, joints lit like a constellation. Shallan gasps the word and comes fully out, scrambling for charcoal and sketchbook.
Adolin confesses Ua'pam had told him about this place; he wanted to see her enjoy something. She sketches and teases. The spren settles on a higher bank of cloud, arches its neck, and very clearly poses for her; a few creationspren peek out of her satchel. They circle into old stories — his first crush, a girl named Idani who joked about wanting to *see his sword* and to whom fourteen-year-old Adolin earnestly bought a classical ulius from the Sunmaker's reign as a gift, which he still owns. He laughs, then tells her how he stopped being charmed: he overheard the same girl mocking Renarin to her friends, and realised beautiful and ugly could live in one person at once. He even has the grace, now, to read her cruelty as a desperate new-arrival's bid for acceptance — though he does not excuse it.
His remark about reasons drifts into the real subject. *We all have reasons why we fail to live up to what we should be,* he says. She feels it land. *You don't have to live up to what your father wants you to be,* she answers. *No one ever accomplished anything by being content with who they were,* he says — and then admits, almost teary, that not long ago all he wanted was for the world to see his father as he saw him; now he cannot stand being around him. Part of it is what Dalinar did to his mother, which still hurts and which he hopes to forgive in time. Most of it is that his father insists on seeing him as a pristine inheritance from his mother — *born better* — and thereby erases any choice he could ever make. *That makes you not a person,* she says, and he reaches for her knee, and they end up close, and as the spren fades back into the cloud — perhaps offended at being ignored — she kisses him. The spren, even as a spren, simply could not compete.