(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Aboard Captain Tozbek's sloop in Longbrow's Straits between the Frostlands and the higher cliffs of Thaylenah, Shallan Davar sits on a lashed-down box at the rail with a charcoal pencil, trying to fix on paper the small, terrible thing she briefly glimpsed in Kharbranth — a sun that was not the sun, charcoal clouds streaming toward it, and a sea made of translucent glass beads. Only days have passed since she nearly destroyed her relationship with her teacher, and her sketch is as much an attempt at sense-making as it is art. The deck rocks; windspren skim past on invisible currents; and then a complex pattern of sharp lines and arrowheads rises like an embossing on her page and slides across it as if a small animal had crawled under a sheet. Shallan shrieks and drops the sketchpad, and the Thaylen crew with their combed-back white eyebrows scramble to snatch her loose sheets out of the wind. The deckhand Yalb hands them back with a mock formality and a joke about the kind of feminine companionship he hopes such words will win him; gloryspren bob around his head as his crewmates laugh.

The lookout shouts. A bobbing, dome-shelled shape pulls alongside the ship and keeps pace with it — a santhid, so reclusive that some of Shallan's books insist the species is extinct. The sailors greet it as fortune; Shallan is more interested in the fact that no living naturalist has ever produced a real drawing of one. She takes a Memory of what she can see, then refuses to be content with a study of a lump in the water. She bullies Yalb into tying a loop in a rope, learns from him that the crew owns a tortoise-shell mask used for inspecting the hull, and dispatches him to the captain for permission. Inwardly she registers the change in herself since her first crossing: she has lost almost everything, has been nearly killed by a man she thought loved her, and discovered that surviving the worst made her less afraid of asking for what she wants.

Tozbek arrives with his quiet wife Ashlv and refuses outright — santhidyn may be harmless, but redwaters and khornaks are not — and the old reflex catches Shallan. She wilts under his decisive look and lets it drop, embarrassed at how easily she had been managed by her father her whole life. Then Jasnah comes up on deck in a havah the Thaylens mutter is prudish, ignoring the sailors' stares with a poise Shallan cannot help envying, and orders a second box lashed beside the first. She leafs through Shallan's sketches — santhid, shirtless sailors, the bead-sea — and lands on the picture of Shadesmar with a question about obedience that suggests she is still measuring her ward's trustworthiness.

Satisfied for now, Jasnah takes Shallan to the bow and begins the lesson Shallan has been too ashamed to ask for. Shadesmar, she explains, is not properly a place but the Cognitive Realm — the realm of the mind — present here, around them, right now; all things have body, soul, and mind, and what Shallan briefly fell into is the mind side of the world. Spren are concepts and forces of that realm, leaked over and given a fragment of sentience by human attention, living in cities of their own. Jasnah has researched them for six years and admits her own words still betray her ignorance; she warns that spren now distrust humans because of an ancient broken oath she cannot name. Shallan sees the strange pattern again, this time on a passing wave, and points it out; Jasnah confirms the pattern-spren is one of the watchers, and that the coincidence of their meeting is suspiciously not coincidence at all. Shallan is no longer free to step away from this work: their attention must turn to the Shattered Plains and the relics of Urithiru, and she will not be returning to Jah Keved for a long time. Jasnah also tells her, plainly, what she is — a chrysalis with the potential to be what the Lost Radiants were, women who danced in the skies and men who broke stone with a touch — because Shallan Soulcasts without a fabrial, as Jasnah herself does.

The practical lesson follows. Jasnah has used a spanreed conversation with her mother Navani — the realm's foremost artifabrian — to arrange two solutions for the failing House Davar: Navani will repair the broken Soulcaster so it can be quietly returned to the Ghostbloods who lent it to Shallan's father, and Jasnah has opened negotiations for a causal — a conditional Vorin betrothal — between Shallan and her cousin Adolin Kholin, heir-presumptive in Alethkar and an inveterate ender of his own courtships. Jasnah is visibly anxious that Shallan will be offended by the lack of consultation; Shallan is overjoyed, then frightened — the Alethi court is the most ferocious in the world. To that Jasnah offers her last lesson of the day: power is largely an illusion of perception. Wealth and armies are real, but on an individual level authority is something others grant to whoever convincingly behaves as though they already hold it, and with practice Shallan can carry herself the same way. Then she goes back below to think.

Shallan tests the lesson on Tozbek at the stern, holding her hands clenched at her sides through the confrontation, refusing to recognise his authority to refuse her. He works his mouth in silence, then grudgingly gives the orders; the sails come down and the ship slows. Wet skirt billowing, Shallan is lowered over the side in a foot-loop with a safety line around her waist, fits on the tortoise-shell mask, and ducks beneath the cold surface. Light streams down in radiant columns onto an ecosystem Shallan is the first scholar she knows of to witness: tiny fish picking at the underside of the shell, arrow-shaped spren drifting through the water, and the santhid itself — a gnarled, ancient grey-blue creature with rippled folds, long blue tendrils trailing into the deep, and one eye as big as her head that rolls toward her and focuses. She blinks, takes a Memory of it, and forgets the cold.