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Shallan returns to Jasnah's rooms at the Palanaeum for the last of the packing and finds Jasnah standing very still in the middle of the floor, looking at a piece of parchment that has been left on the work table. Shallan crosses to look. Three interlocking diamonds have been drawn on it in fresh blood — drawn carefully, with a brush, by someone who took the time to make the lines clean. The blood is still wet at the edges. The parchment is the kind Jasnah keeps in her own desk.

Jasnah does not call the palanaeum guards. She picks the parchment up by one corner, walks it to the fireplace, and burns it. She tells Shallan that the symbol belongs to the Ghostbloods and that she has seen variants of it three times before — twice in Azir, once in Thaylen City — and that on each occasion the messenger who left it returned within a fortnight to make the offer their organisation makes to scholars whose work they want. Shallan asks what the offer is. Jasnah tells her that the offer is irrelevant; the threat is real.

Shallan is shaken in a way she does not let Jasnah see. She has just chosen, an hour ago, the scholarly road her princess walks. The road, it turns out, comes with people who leave blood on parchment in your locked room. She thinks of her brothers. She thinks of the Soulcaster still hidden in her safehand pouch. She thinks of how very many things she has not told Jasnah. She helps pack the last of the books in silence. By evening they are on a ship for the Shattered Plains, and the Ghostbloods are, for the moment, behind them.