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Shallan has Jasnah's working Soulcaster hidden in her safepouch and cannot, for the life of her, make it work. She tries thinking commands at it. She tries speaking them aloud in the empty room. She tries pressing a strand of her own hair across the smokestone the way Luesh used to. Nothing changes about anything she points it at. The garnet stays a garnet. The water stays water. Luesh is dead and had told Nan Balat only that the activation was easier to show than to explain, and there is no one left in the family who can show her.

She faces, in the lamplight, the shape of what her theft has actually bought her. She could carry the device home unused and hand it over to the three-diamond faction who have been waiting on it; that gets her family the protection they need, at the cost of giving a working Soulcaster to a group whose other dealings she has never wanted to look at. She could take it to the Veden king or to one of the senior ardents of Kharbranth for help, either of which would be a deeper betrayal of Jasnah than the theft itself and either of which could end with her family on a Veden gallows. She turns the fabrial over and over in her safehand and is no closer to a choice when the light fades.

She has, on top of all of that, a problem with her own hand. When she lets her drawing wander she now produces, with a focus she does not remember entering, an unsettling collection of inhuman creatures — knife-thin figures, faceless servants, hollow-eyed predators — that she did not consciously sketch and cannot account for. The pages will not leave her head. She finally breaks out the last of Kabsal's strawberry jam and bread for dinner because she cannot face going up to the dining hall, and chews slowly in the lamplight thinking. Another difficult decision to add to the string of them. Well. Jasnah has trained her hard on those.