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Shallan wakes in a sunlit private hospital room in Kharbranth some hours after the panic in her chamber, propped on white linens with her drawing board on her lap and the cut on her arm bound. Kabsal comes to see her not long after midday, carrying — as he has carried every visit — a small pot of strawberry jam, a fresh loaf, and the careful nervous warmth of a man building up to something. He has decided, he tells her after small talk and bread, that it is time to make a proposal. He sees a future for the two of them outside Jasnah's shadow, in a quiet ardent's house in some smaller city, with her drawings and his bread. They share the jam on the bread. Within a few minutes she cannot focus on his face.

The jam and the bread are poison and antidote, separated. He has been carrying them every visit to the alcove for as long as he has known her, meant for Jasnah alone. He believed his food at the alcove was being pre-tested by Jasnah's parshmen and that the configuration was safe; he did not know Shallan was eating from the same loaf. He understood the faction's setup — one component consumed alone would kill; the two together would do nothing. Now both of them have eaten both. He convulses on the floor of the hospital room while Shallan stares from the bed and dies in less than a minute.

Jasnah arrives at a run a heartbeat after the convulsion. She catches Shallan as the poison takes her too, calls for a garnet from the medical cabinet, and prepares the desperate measure of Soulcasting Shallan's own blood to purify it — a flesh-Soulcasting for which she has no real skill and which has been known to kill the patient. Shallan, fading, upends her safepouch onto the bedside table. The golden Soulcaster tumbles out of it beside Kabsal's garnet on the floor. Jasnah sees it and gasps. Something flashes through Shallan like sudden heat — like, almost, the breath in her own chest catching fire. She arches once on the bed, screams, and goes black.