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Two days after the highstorm vision, Dalinar walks with Adolin and Renarin to the king's Feast Basin — a flooded Soulcast depression of five stone islands joined by scrollwork bridges. The strap investigation is going nowhere: three more leatherworkers, three opinions. The cut may have been natural wear; the only evidence of assassination has dissolved. Dalinar will tell Elhokar and ask if there is anywhere else to pursue.

At the bridge to the king's island the King's Wit sits insulting every lighteyes as they pass; he greets Dalinar civilly and warns that the rumors about him have grown teeth — even the talk of abandoning the Vengeance Pact has leaked out. On the king's island Navani is back from Alethkar — she has decided that Queen Aesudan can hold the homeland and that her son is in more danger out here. She tells Dalinar bluntly that Elhokar is weak — only because she trusts Dalinar enough to say it aloud — and arranges to meet him in a week, in a public place, under cover of reading him from Gavilar's book. Dalinar's wife's face is gone from his memory; Navani's months of playing him and Gavilar off each other as a young woman remain in painful detail.

Then Elhokar rises and announces, without warning Dalinar, that he is appointing Brightlord Torol Sadeas Highprince of Information — charged with unearthing the truth of the cut girth. The same girth investigation that began under Dalinar's protection. The king explains afterward that Sadeas suggested it himself as a gentler warm-up for the Highprince of War revival Dalinar asked for. Dalinar realizes Sadeas has just outmaneuvered him brilliantly: any finding from the new investigation can only reflect badly on the Kholins, the hunt and the king's grooms were under their watch — and the path to Highprince of War has been quietly closed. And the vision-voice told him to trust Sadeas.