POV: shallan
Summary
On the chilled deck of the Wind's Pleasure, a hat over her hair, a coat over her dress, a glove on her freehand, and her safehand pinned safely in its sleeve, Shallan sits with her notebook to study the spren she has named Pattern. He floats in front of her as a swirling ball of three-dimensional infinite lines, then drops flat into the deck and ripples across her bowl of small green fruit, each one raising the imprint of his geometry like an embossing. He pronounces the idea of eating "Terrible destruction!" and retreats. He grasps abstractions easily — when she first told him her purpose was to find truth, he understood at once — but he cannot make sense of the body's needs, and he cannot remember anything that came before her. Pressed for his first memory he answers only "Green. Food not eaten" with a vibration like wind in branches, and for an instant Shallan half-sees her father's gardens around her, the deck turned to dirt under her feet and Pattern drawn in the dust. She slams the memory shut with horror.
Yalb arrives towing a new much-larger deckhand, picked up at the last port, and conscripts Shallan into corroborating his cheerful boast of having served as her footman when she met the king in Kharbranth — a half-truth that earns the larger man another lecture on the importance of taking galley duty. He sends him off, then asks Shallan whether the deck really did turn green for a moment. She gives him a deliberately scholarly non-answer and he accepts it with an affable salute. Pattern, when she returns to him, hums in appreciation — that was a "true lie", a good lie — and tries out the new word as if savouring it. She makes more sketches of him hovering and flattened and, when the spheres in her goblet begin to dim, goes belowdecks to read.
A few hours into a peaceful evening of cross-referencing — including the older scholar Alai's account that the Nightwatcher is one of the rare spren that genuinely converse — she sets the book down satisfied. For perhaps the first time she can remember she is simply a scholar at her work. Her brothers' last spanreed reply was almost hopeful at the prospect of the Soulcaster being returned. She is sailing toward a city on the edge of the world, betrothed to one of the most powerful unmarried men in the kingdom, and is free to read. Reaching into her safepouch for spheres, she finds the ones there completely dun, while the older ones in her goblet still hold Light. Pattern, on the wall by her head, hums "Lies."
She crosses the narrow companionway to borrow spheres from Jasnah and finds her teacher's door swinging open on its broken latch and Jasnah herself at the desk with her head in her hand, eyes haunted, a few exhaustionspren rising around her temple. A fearspren wriggles on the tabletop until Jasnah pushes a book on top of it. Pattern gives Shallan away from the floor — "Truth!" — and Jasnah's composure snaps back into place a beat late. She demands whether Shallan has been Soulcasting against her word; when Shallan explains the brief green deck, Jasnah turns at once to a diagram as old as Vorinism — the Double Eye of the Almighty, ten spheres linked into an hourglass — and names it. Ten Essences, ten Surges, ten orders. One of those Surges is Illumination, the mastery of light, and from now on Shallan is to practise that, not Soulcasting, which has become too dangerous. She presses the pouch of fresh spheres on her and tells her to keep them on her at all times so the Surgebinding has room to come.
Shallan refuses to leave the room. Jasnah's real fear, she presses; what is it? Jasnah gives her the rest of it, after admitting she does not understand it all herself. Before Shallan's arrival she had been able to hope she was an anomaly; she can hope no longer. The Cryptics sent Shallan to her because Shallan would need training, which means Surgebindings are returning in numbers — exactly as they always did before a Desolation. In the past such Returns came with the Heralds and generations of teachers; this one has neither. Jasnah is convinced — and the research she has shown Shallan supports it — that the Voidbringers of legend were captured and enslaved long ago as the parshmen; that the Parshendi's impossible long-distance unison-singing implies the parshmen share some way of acting in concert without speaking; and that they will rise at the next storm. She has written to scholars, kings, and ardents around the world and been called paranoid for it. Her last hope, beyond her mother Navani, is her brother and her uncle.
There is a second reason for the Shattered Plains. Urithiru itself is not there — but the path to it may be, and by the old stories only a Radiant can open the way. The vault might preserve the kind of primary sources the Hierocracy never managed to scrub of Radiants, Voidbringers, or Surgebinding — possibly even confirmation of the old claim that the city was holy and shielded from the Voidbringers themselves. The parshmen, meanwhile, would not even need to fight to break human society; if they merely walked away the economic shock alone would do it, and Jasnah fears her brother does not have the courage to risk the collapse expelling them would cause. She hands Shallan a single volume — the best surviving source she has on the order Radiants called the Lightweavers, titled Words of Radiance — promises to actually sleep, and tells Shallan to stop mothering her; even Navani is not permitted that.
Back in her own cabin, Shallan sets the new book on the small table beside her cot, intending to start it fresh in the morning. The image of terror in Jasnah's eyes will not leave her; Jasnah should not fear anything. She curls up and lets the rocking of the ship coax her to sleep. She wakes to screams, shouts, and smoke.