Heretic
POV: shallan
Summary
Around the corner Shallan finds Jasnah — taller and far more beautiful than she had imagined, statuesque in Alethi blue and silver — in conversation with an elderly man in Kharbranth's royal orange and white. With a start Shallan realizes he is King Taravangian of Kharbranth, treating Jasnah with the deference owed to the sister of an Alethi king.
Jasnah's freehand bears a Soulcaster — a fabrial of two rings and a bracelet linked by chains holding three large gems set across the back of her hand: a smokestone, a diamond, and a ruby. Shallan stares: it is identical to the broken Soulcaster her brothers found in their dead father's coat. The artifact is the entire reason she came.
As they walk, Jasnah makes it clear that meeting was not the same as being accepted. She begins an unforgiving interview: music, languages, writing, formal logic, history, the sciences. Shallan does her best (music passable; the older books on her father's shelves; biology and botany pursued on her own) but is humiliated on logic past the standards Jasnah names and on history past a single popular survey. She catches herself answering with a sailor's sharp tongue and apologizes; Jasnah notes that her stepmother Malise Gevelmar also died recently and wonders aloud why Shallan is here at all instead of with her father.
They reach a corridor blocked by a highstorm-cracked boulder fallen from the ceiling, trapping the king's granddaughter and her nursemaids in the room beyond. Jasnah was not summoned for this; the king is simply taking advantage of her presence in trade for Palanaeum access. She closes her eyes, presses her hand to the stone, and Soulcasts the boulder to smoke. The cut gems blaze; for an instant Shallan hears something like a distant chord of voices singing one note, and then a thousand-fire's worth of black smoke roars into the corridor and the way opens. The king rushes in to embrace his granddaughter.
Jasnah turns to Shallan to give her answer. Shallan, desperate, insists she has not been tested on painting and drawing — the arts she is best at; she has brought her portfolio. Jasnah dismisses the visual arts as frivolity and refuses the wardship. As Jasnah follows the grateful king toward the Palanaeum, Shallan is left alone in the corridor, clutching a sooty rag and the wreckage of six months of pursuit. Six months earlier, in the manor library, she had explained the whole plan to her brothers: not to be Jasnah's student, but to learn where Jasnah keeps her working Soulcaster — and steal it. House Davar must not fall. She wipes her eyes, hardens her step, and walks after Jasnah Kholin.