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Hurrying back through the burnt-orange Conclave corridor — still smoke-stained where Jasnah Soulcast the boulder — Shallan looks for a way to change a powerful woman's mind. She passes mute parshmen cleaning soot from the walls and steels herself: she has to be Jasnah's ward. Without Jasnah's working Soulcaster there is no House Davar. The plan she will not say aloud is to substitute the broken Davar fabrial for Jasnah's — Luesh can no longer make the family's device work, and her brothers' forged letters can only stall a year at most.

A master-servant leads her down the long, sloped hallway to a pair of steel doors carved with a vast geometric chart, beyond which lies the Veil — a chamber so high its ceiling is invisible, lit only by distant alcove-lights. Beyond that is the Palanaeum itself, with seven hundred thousand texts on its crystal-walled shelves. Entry costs a thousand sapphire broams. She cannot follow Jasnah inside; she is told she may instead wait in Jasnah's reading alcove. Parshman porters raise her platform up a stone shaft by pulley to a balcony forty feet above the floor.

To clear her head, Shallan draws. She sketches Kharbranth from her Memory of the docks, then Yalb and the Kharbranth porter, and finally — her masterpiece for the day — Jasnah standing before the cracked corridor stone with the Soulcaster alight. Silvery creationspren gather around her pad in changing shapes; she thinks of drawing as a way of cutting bud-cuttings from a person's soul. With the picture drying, she begins the second prong of her plan: a brushpen letter to Jasnah arguing that hard-won, self-taught education has its own merit, and asking the rationalist princess to treat her own decision as a preliminary result subject to revision.

A bearded ardent called Brother Kabsal arrives at the alcove looking for Jasnah herself. He admires Shallan's sketches, recognizes her style as that of Dandos the Oilsworn — three hundred years dead — and laughs when she admits she learned it from a book. He lacquers the Jasnah portrait for her with a perfumed bulb-sprayer and, before leaving, mentions his name Kabsal and an unusual fondness — jam. He has long sought to convert Jasnah, the most public heretic in Vorin lands, and has asked her for audience more than once. Promising to return, he withdraws, and a moment later footsteps and an unhappy Jasnah return to the alcove with her attendants. Shallan gathers her satchel, leaves the brushpen letter on the desk, and steps aside to wait.