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Shallan wakes alone in a sunlit private hospital room with a single guard at the door and a fresh bandage on her arm. The Soulcaster is gone from her bedside. She remembers Kabsal on the floor of the other room — the convulsions, the bread crumbs on his collar, the silence after — in the moment before the black. The guard at the door refuses to speak to her at all. After a miserable half-hour Jasnah strides in in a stark new black-and-grey dress and dismisses the guard with a single word.

She does not accuse. She just tells. Kabsal is dead. The bread he carried every visit to the alcove was dusted with backbreaker powder — a poison so lethal that a spoonful would kill an army — and the strawberry jam, together with the garnet stone he always carried in his coat, held the antidote. Eaten in the proportions he had been bringing for months, they did nothing; bread alone would have killed Jasnah within minutes. This last visit he used more powder than usual, perhaps hoping that she would breathe in some of the dust as he laid the loaf out — it would have worked on her faster, and quietly. It worked faster than he expected, and it killed him too.

The other ardents at the Palanaeum knew him only vaguely. None of them remembered him being assigned to the chapel; none of them remembered approving his correspondences. He was an assassin from the day he first crossed Shallan's path, using her as a pleasant excuse to get a poisoner's table set at Jasnah's elbow. He had not, Jasnah is reasonably sure, intended for Shallan to die — but he had not given her enough thought to prevent it. Shallan sits in the white sheets and lets herself, for one breath and no longer, feel like a fool who has been played all the way through. Then she puts the feeling away. Jasnah is still in the room. Jasnah has not, yet, said anything about the Soulcaster on the floor.