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A shadow tries to throw Shallan straight into the moment she first saw her mother again. She refuses and asks the Spiritual Realm to give her room to run up to it, surprised when the chaos shifts in response to her will. She lands in her own body in a chair at Urithiru, the royal Alethi makeup artists fussing over her — back inside her own wedding day.

She had committed to the match with Adolin only after Thaylen Field, where Dalinar united the realms and where, more privately, Adolin saw through her facades to the real woman beneath. Then Kaladin's gift had arrived — boots in a military cut sized for her — and her stress had cracked under her own laughter. She let herself live in both women at once, the bride and the visitor from a year later; for her, being two people at once was the easy part.

In the small meditation room, Pattern arrived with Testament in tow — full-sized, weak, present at last. *She wanted to be here, on this day, a year ago.* Testament mumbled two words at her: *enjoy it.* Shallan had not, the first time. Today she meant to. She accepted the brothers' invasion of her room, embraced them as though for the first time in ages — which, for the visitor, it nearly was — and accepted Mraize's letter with the implicit threat tucked into the inside fold, and ignored it. Today the day was hers.

The ceremony was held in one of the high rooms of Urithiru with frosted peaks visible through the window. Joyspren swirled like blue leaves through a crowd that contained her brothers, her squires — Vathah, Ishnah, Red, Gaz, even Shob — Sebarial and Palona looking like the parents she had borrowed, Ka and Rushu, the ladies dripping with gemstones lit from within, the men in white with house colours on sashes and capes. Kaladin stood in a back corner with an emotionless face. Adolin entered from his own meditation room, by Alethi tradition coming forward as she did, wearing a brand-new side sword — one of forty-seven gifts that day, Kaladin's, the one he chose because for him it was an earnest acknowledgement of a friend, not a notch on a rival.

She met him in the centre of the room. By Alethi custom no one led them or gave them away — they were their own free people, owned by none. Navani and Palona witnessed at the arch. Wit stood beside it in black, the only person in the room wearing that colour. Adolin's trusted ex-ardent Kadash officiated, weaving the homily of bonfire from candle — that none keeps an oath perfectly, that two oaths sworn together stand stronger than apart. They spoke their oaths; Shallan improvised on the wording she had prepared, *when we are both weak, at least we will not be alone,* and Adolin grinned, *gemheart,* and kissed her before Kadash said it was time. He could improvise too. She held the kiss in an explosion of passionspren like crystalline snow, breath against his breath, and prayed in that moment for the present-day man who was, somewhere, alive without her.

She broke the kiss and looked for the spren. Pattern and Testament stood unobserved by the rest of the room, and she saw a tine of Testament's pattern unbend, a small thing righting itself. Testament had not been able to attend the first time; this time she could. Shallan looked away from her spren toward Kaladin brooding in his corner, then toward Sebarial and Palona — and behind them, the flash of red hair, and the face.

The face she had once let Veil hold for her. Today she sees it for herself. Her mother stands at the back of the room, among the servants. The Herald Shallan killed had died and Returned — broken on Braize and come back to Roshar — and in doing so, Shallan now realises, had initiated the Return of all of them and unleashed the Voidbringers. The catastrophe that has consumed the realms began with the daughter killing the mother who had been ordered to kill her.