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In the round temple in Thaylen City, Taravangian hands Fen a sealed contract — signed by Jasnah — ordering an assassin to watch Aesudan with permission to kill her if necessary. Jasnah had burned the original; he has recreated it from the past. *Why,* he asks softly, *would you have assassins watch your own family?* Then, a step later: *Did you ever explore the possibility of assassinating Fen?* She admits she investigated every monarch and assessed every threat. Her option had been to kill the Thaylen queen, before they were friends.

Fen surprises her: she could not have done the same in reverse. She would scream and bluster, but to assassinate a friend, even for her people, she has always worried she was too soft for. Taravangian notes the asymmetry kindly. *You have a model before you,* he tells Fen. *Jasnah does not seek the greater good. She seeks her own greater good.* He widens the scope — billions of lives across the cosmere, planets she will never see — and asks whether she would sacrifice Roshar to save them. She cannot answer that she would. *If you cannot know the greater good, why claim to seek it?* She closes her mouth; he nods slightly, almost gentle, in acknowledgement that she has refused the trap.

She tries to turn the room. *He double-crossed us. He is the one Fen would be making a deal with — his history matters more than mine.* Taravangian inclines his head a second time at the move. Then he reframes: in his empire, the singers and humans have always lived together; only humans, in recent memory, have nearly exterminated a sapient people. He offers Thaylenah exemption from conscription. Fen starts negotiating protections against pressured volunteering. *Don't let negotiations start,* Jasnah thinks, and forces the debate back to principle: siding with him is a betrayal of Roshar. *Honor is dead,* he tells Fen, and offers her a hand in ending religious strife across worlds.

He hunts Jasnah's core. *Doesn't it appeal to you? A crusade to put down the gods?* *No,* she says, finding her footing. *My core is rationality, not hatred. I am not defined by my heresy. I am against dogma of any variety — God, nationality, philosophy — when one cannot reconsider it. When new information arrives, I change. I will not join you. I am not you.* He nods to her a third time, and inwardly she dares to believe she has won.

Then he flips the board. *Jasnah would sacrifice Thaylenah to defeat me. Just as she would sacrifice any planet to protect Roshar. Just as she would kill you to protect her family. Family. Kingdom. World. In that order.* *Would you deny it?* She hesitates one sentence too long. *By the first winds,* Fen whispers. *That's a lie. You would sacrifice Thaylenah to defeat him.* Taravangian stands. *When Dalinar made his contract, what thought did he give Thaylenah? None. He froze a Herdazian line out of a promise and forgot the rest.*

*What if we renegotiated the contract?* — Jasnah's own voice, from his palm. He has Lightwoven their private council: her, Fen, Wit, Dalinar, Navani in a room of plants. The simulacrum Jasnah repeats herself for Fen to hear. *Sometimes you have to think about yourself first.* And again, louder. *Sometimes you have to think about yourself first.* She tries to recover with prisoner-dilemma philosophy, but the words from her own throat damn her. Taravangian sweetens it for Fen — the greatest deal any nation will ever get from him, Thaylenah never again subject to Alethkar — and turns back to Jasnah. *Tell me I'm wrong. Look me in the eyes, and lie.*

The truth he has brought is the worst of his weapons. Aligning with him would in fact protect Fen's people best; even if Dalinar wins the contest, the Thaylen are bound for ruinous austerity. Her core rocks. She acknowledges, finally, that she cannot see the greater good, and never has been able to. *I'd take the deal,* Fen tells him. *No I wouldn't,* Jasnah snaps — and hears in her own voice the lie. *He's right,* Fen whispers. *You lie.*

Jasnah sees the assassination order to Aesudan, the lesson in the Kharbranth alley, the sword she had once put to Renarin's neck — all in a new light. *I didn't swing,* she thinks. But that only proves Taravangian right: she had loved them too much to kill them. Her philosophy is a sham. Jasnah Kholin loves her family, her people, her kingdom. In that order. She sits, and the negotiations begin. By their end, Thaylenah joins the enemy without a single sword being raised.