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Six years before the events of the main story, Jasnah Kholin moves through a perfume-heavy feast hall in Kholinar hosted in honor of the new treaty with the Parshendi, pretending to enjoy it while she waits for the meeting she has scheduled with an assassin. Her uncle Dalinar is already loud with wine at the high table, calling for the Parshendi drummers; her brother Elhokar hurries to quiet him while his wife Aesudan sneers behind a handkerchief. The flute quartet on the dais has long since gone tedious, the gossip about Jasnah's public heresy louder than the music. The Parshendi delegation, the night's honorees, cluster nervously near the high table in their bright wraps, not festive at all. As Jasnah crosses toward the doors her shadow slides the wrong way along the floor, stretching toward a wall lamp instead of away — the cold, clammy episode she has been trying for months to explain. It corrects itself before anyone notices, but she catches sight of an incongruous Shin manservant in loose white helping the Parshendi drummers carry their instruments through the door.

Slipping out through the servants' corridor she is surprised to find her father Gavilar outside the feast in quiet, urgent conference with Brightlord Meridas Amaram, Tearim looming behind in the king's Plate — the king having lately handed the armor to his finest duelist and taken to wearing classical robes instead. Gavilar sends Amaram off with a hand on his shoulder and a single hard word, then deflects Jasnah's questions about the treaty with a soft cut at her loneliness and a hint that Amaram would still make her a fine match. He looks at her with something close to suspicion before returning to the feast, and she leaves wondering whether he has learned of her meetings with assassins.

Deeper in the empty corridors her shadow rebels again, leaning toward the Stormlight lamps. When she snaps at it aloud, the shadows at a distant intersection rise and take the shapes of figures — chief among them a lithe, oil-skinned man who draws a sword. The lamp beside her dies, the palace shatters into thousands of small glass beads, and Jasnah falls through a dark sky into a clattering sea of them. She nearly drowns, the beads pushing into her mouth and nose, each one impressing on her the ghost of an object — a cup, a coat, a statue, a lantern — until she finds one ancient and ponderous (the palace itself) and forces her power into it, commanding it to rise. A platform of fused beads carries her up; she shapes a second bead into a rough statue of Talenelat'Elin from the feast hall to ward off the oil-skinned figure. He pauses, raises two fingers to his forehead, bows, and the place dissolves back into the real palace corridor with its lamps gone dark. She knows the name from nursery tales: Shadesmar, the kingdom of the spren.

Composing herself, she keeps her appointment with Liss — known to the underworld as the Weeper for the burned-out eye sockets she leaves behind, a secret she trades on because no one suspects the assassin is a woman. Jasnah decides at the table to set aside the contract she came to make and substitutes a second envelope: instead of killing Aesudan, Liss will be placed inside the household as a maid and report. As she leaves, Liss mentions in passing that her own most recent manservant, a Shin man she found unsettlingly skilled, was sold off to a slaver weeks ago. Jasnah catches the connection a moment late.

The Parshendi drums above cut off mid-beat and become screams. Jasnah runs upward through corridors strewn with corpses whose eye sockets are burned hollow, past Shardblade cuts in the stone, and reaches her father's broken quarters in time to see Gavilar — wearing his own Plate now, the helm cracked — stagger toward the balcony as it splinters beneath him. He and the Shin assassin from the feast fall together; the assassin glows white, lands on the outer palace wall as if it were the floor, and walks down it to finish the king. Gangnah, Klade, and Varnali of the Parshendi ruling council step into the doorway and quietly claim the killing as their own, saying only that Gavilar had been on the verge of an act they considered catastrophically dangerous. Highprince Sadeas crashes in shouting orders, already wearing the king's regal robes, and calls for soldiers and for the crown prince to be moved to safety. Hours later it will be clear that the three surrendered elders bought the rest of their delegation time to flee the city, and that Dalinar's pursuing cavalry was annihilated in the dark. Jasnah, standing over her father's body and the Shardblade that has appeared beside it, refuses the comfort of grief and fastens onto the one fact she can hold: an assassin who walked the palace wall. Whatever she had seen tonight in the place of beads, she resolves, she will learn what it meant.