Sas Nahn
POV: shallan
Summary
Jasnah tells Shallan flatly that she will leave Kharbranth for Jah Keved in the morning. Passage has been arranged. *Sometimes I forget how young you are*, she says, without sitting down. *I can see how the theft might have looked tempting to you. It was stupid nonetheless.* She lists the consequences as if reading them off a ledger. There will be a public reduction of Shallan's rank to sas nahn, the lowest honorific rung the Veden court recognises. The story of the foolish scheme will stain her life for the next two or three decades and probably longer. No woman of any standing will take her on as a ward again. Her marital prospects will collapse. *I hate being wrong about a person*, Jasnah says, and walks out without waiting for a reply.
Shallan curls under the white sheet with her stomach in knots and the bandage on her arm itching. For one wretched moment that she will be ashamed of in the morning she wishes she had cut the glass shard a little deeper, or that Jasnah had been a little slower in finding her. She has lost the only future she had walked toward in her own right — not the Soulcaster, which she may even yet keep, but the wardship, the scholarship, the life she had let herself want.
Sunlight fades outside the hospital window. The wall lamp comes on a low setting and stays there. Nobody comes back in to check on her — not Jasnah, not the guard, not an ardent. Shallan lies in the half-dark and runs through, in her head, what she will say to her brothers when she walks off the Tozbek ship in two weeks with the Soulcaster in her pouch and nothing else, and the answer she finds is that she does not yet know.