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Shallan wakes mostly dry on an uneven rock that rises from the sea off the Frostlands coast, dress salt-crusted, hair stuck to her face, head pounding, her feet too numb to feel the waves at them. A long brown shell is just visible on the water, moving away toward the horizon: a santhid, the one she met days ago, somehow having dragged her clear of the Wind's Pleasure as the deck melted to water under the assassins. She watches it go and wonders, in spite of everything, whether the species can communicate and whether she could have asked it questions. She catches herself doing it — distracting herself with scholarship instead of grieving — and admits inwardly that this is how she has always survived. Jasnah is dead. Pattern forms on the face of a wave beside her and reports he has seen no other survivors, only the ship gone and splashing in the dark.

The tide pulls back enough that she dares the swim. She cannot really swim. She slips into the bay, half-flailing through cold she still feels and a dress that drags at her legs, swallows half the bay, and stumbles onto a seaweed-strewn beach where cremlings clack at her ankles and fearspren wriggle up around her bare feet only after the danger is past. She kneels and traces a glyphward in the sand in lieu of burning one, bows her head for ten heartbeats, then walks the shore for hours looking for any other survivor. There are none. Her safehand sleeve is sodden, her feet sliced and reddened, her safepouch holds spheres that have all gone dun. She works out a plan that is barely a plan — gather wood, build a small shielded fire, watch the dark for other fires, but stay clear of any she finds in case they are bandits, pirates, or assassins from the ship. She has never lit a fire in her life. The next highstorm is one or two days away.

Pattern excitedly leads her to a half-submerged shape that is not a person but Jasnah's trunk, its waterproof seal having held. The books and notes are intact — Jasnah's life's work has survived even if she has not — along with infused spheres. Shallan drags the trunk inland to a stand of trees, builds a useless pile of sticks for a firepit, and decides to make her fire by Soulcasting instead. Pattern warns her: this is dangerous. What is land here is sea there.

She slides carefully into Shadesmar, keeping one eye on the physical world as the trees pop into beads beneath her and a sea of beads shifts under her feet. Huge dark birdlike exhaustionspren she did not realise grew that large on this side wheel above her. Pattern stands tall and robed beside her, casting his shadow the wrong way — toward the cold-seeming small sun rather than away from it — and notes that he himself is from this place and yet remembers almost nothing about it. She kneels and finds the bead that is the stick, with Pattern translating its small voice for her. *I am a stick.* She tries argument after argument — that fire would be fun, that she will give it Stormlight, that sticks need Stormlight for things — and the stick is unmoved. *I am a stick.* Her Stormlight runs out, the exhaustion crashes back, and she tumbles into the bead-sea for one terrible instant before throwing herself out of Shadesmar entirely. She collapses against Jasnah's trunk, teeth chattering, her breath visible.

She curls up. Almost sleeps. She makes herself stand. Power, Jasnah had said, is largely an illusion of perception — and this, Shallan thinks bitterly, is a direct refutation of that out here in the wilderness — but it is also the only authority she has left. She decides to die walking rather than die curled up, abandons the cold pile of sticks, and stumbles into the dark toward what may be the second moon and may be a fire. Pattern follows at her feet through the blood she does not feel herself leaving on the rock. She walks. And walks. And walks into the middle of a small camp, lies down beside the fire, and sleeps.

She wakes to a portly Thaylen in a knit cap and a patched suit politely asking, in Alethi, whether the Brightness is well. The camp is three chull-drawn wagons with cages on the back, a half-load of slaves, two large hulking Vorin guards with cudgels at their belts — Bluth and Tag — and a pair of marbled-skinned parshmen trudging in with rockbud husks for the fires. Slavers. Out here in the Frostlands, beyond any nation's rule, what is and isn't legal will be whatever they decide; what saves her is the calculation that a lighteyed Vorin woman in lit-dahn dress is a thing they would not have politely woken. Her safehand sleeve has been pulled open in the night and the sphere she carried into the dark is gone. Her feet are agony, painspren clawing up around them like orange hands of sinew.

She does the only thing she can think of. She becomes Jasnah — not the conceited authority her father wore, but the quiet expectation that the world will do as she says. She tells Tvlakv her name is Davar, that she has been shipwrecked, that her servants are dead, that he and his men will retrieve her trunk and lash it to a wagon, and that the caravan will turn around and bear her not south to the Shallow Crypts but north to the Shattered Plains — for which she will pay them very, very well. She braces for the act to fail. Tvlakv sputters, wrings his cap, glances at his guards — and then quietly does as she has said. The trunk is fetched and lashed. The chulls are hitched. The caravan turns north.