POV: shallan
Summary
Still half asleep, Shallan panics out of her cot at the smell of smoke and the screaming above, and her flailing knocks the wax-anchored goblet free; spheres roll loose across the cabin floor. The ship is not on fire. She throws open her door onto torches in the narrow passageway — flamespren dancing about the flames, three men holding them above their heads, axes in their hands, their backs to her. They are clustered at the open door of Jasnah's cabin, watching what is happening inside. In one frozen moment another figure pitches a body in a thin nightgown out at the men's feet — Jasnah, eyes already sightless, blood blossoming from the breast — and the leader tells the man with the knife to "Be sure." He kneels and rams a long thin blade down through Jasnah's chest into the wood beneath her, hard enough that Shallan hears the floor. She screams. The blunt-faced "new kid" deckhand Yalb picked up at the last port spins toward her at the sound, and Shallan slams her door and shoots the bolt home with shaking fingers.
They begin to shoulder the door — they will not need the axes. Shallan backs against the cot, spheres rolling underfoot, the window too narrow to fit through. Pattern buzzes from the wall by her head. *Sword. Fight. The sword.* She refuses, calls it a nightmare, hyperventilates; he tries again — *Lies* — and presses on the half-memory of a child playing with a shimmering pattern of light. Asked what to do, he tells her she needs the Light. Without quite knowing how she does it, she breathes in sharply and drains the spheres around her, the cabin going dark as a cavern, then Light rises off her skin like vapor off boiling water. Shape the lie, he says. Make the truth. She does not understand. The door splits, torchlight comes through — and the Stormlight streams out of her body in a cloud and forms a vague glowing humanoid blur that flows out past the killers into the passageway, Shallan herself falling into shadow as she kneels behind it. Their eyes follow the apparition. They give chase.
Hands at the sides of her head, she sends Pattern up to scout. She is shaking, but tells herself this is not the night her father died; whatever else this is, she has survived worse. These are the same people Kabsal was: the killers Jasnah had been bracing for. Jasnah is dead. Grief, later. Pattern returns and reports in halting horror — dark men killing, sailors tied with ropes, one already bleeding out, the men who chased her apparition now searching the water for what they think jumped overboard. Fearspren wriggle up out of the wood at her feet.
She feels her way down the dark corridor into Jasnah's ransacked cabin, expecting at every step to trip over the body — it has been dragged elsewhere — and drags a box across the broken door to hold it shut. The trunk of books is gone; the bed is wet with blood she will not look at. In the bottom of a thrown-open trunk she finds the hidden drawer she had not known existed, and the spheres inside are bright enough to blind her. Above, Tozbek is bellowing for his wife Ashlv to be spared. The assassins are executing the crew one at a time. The only thing Shallan can give them is chaos. She tells Pattern they are going to Soulcast the hull out from under the ship.
Pattern refuses to translate the command as she gives it — she is not ready — and promises instead to intercede. The cabin pops into thousands of black glass beads. Shallan does not fall this time but stands on a glassy black floor of obsidian beneath a black sky and a tiny faraway sun: Shadesmar, the Cognitive Realm. Crystal trees rise spiky and leafless around her. The crew above show here as small candle flames hanging in the air, with fish-minds glimmering in clusters at her feet. Pattern himself stands tall and willowy beside her in a stiff robe with hands behind his back, head a translucent geometry, and points her at one of the heavier spheres — the bead that is the Wind's Pleasure herself.
She lifts the bead and feels the impression of a proud old sloop, loved and tended through generations of Tozbek's family, refusing to become anything but a ship. *No. I serve. I am happy.* Shallan, cradling it, tells the ship what is happening on its own deck and that the only service it can still do its sailors is to stop being a ship at all. Above, one of the floating candle flames goes out as she pleads. Another. Finally the ship answers, *I will change*. Stormlight tears out of Shallan in a hectic instant; she hears the distant cracks of gemstones shattering from how much she has pulled, Shadesmar vanishes, and she is back in Jasnah's cabin as floor, walls, and ceiling melt into icy black water beneath and around her. She is plunged into the dark, dress dragging her down, the common artifacts of human life sinking past her. As she searches for the surface something in the darkness wraps around her and pulls her deeper.