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Alone in her chamber after dinner Shallan tries the stolen Soulcaster yet again — and this time something answers. The glass pitcher on the writing-table thickens, darkens, and pours itself across the table and the floor as a slick of fresh blood. The smell hits her a half-second after the sight does. Worse, in the same moment she is briefly pulled somewhere else — a sky-as-sea realm of small dark beads stretching to a black horizon, a sun that is not the right sun, and a ring of pattern-faced spren gathered around her on the bead-surface, chanting in unison *you have brought us back.*

She comes to with the blood pooled across the floor and her hands smeared in it where they should not be. A knock at the chamber door. Jasnah's voice from the other side. The Soulcaster is in her safepouch and she cannot put it anywhere Jasnah will not find it. In panic she grabs the largest shard of the broken pitcher with her safehand through her sleeve, cuts a shallow gash in her own forearm to account for some of the blood, drops the shard onto the table where she fell, and lets herself collapse on the floor with the Soulcaster clutched inside her safepouch.

Jasnah comes in. She gasps at what she sees on the floor and is across the room in three steps. She calls for help, presses on the wound, sends a runner for a surgeon; parshmen and household servants arrive at the door at a run; Shallan, pretending unconsciousness with her eyes barely cracked, lets herself be lifted. *This*, she thinks dimly into the lamplight as they carry her out, *will not end well.*