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Shallan rides north toward the Shattered Plains on the seat of one of Tvlakv's wagons, perched beside the slab-faced Bluth who drives the chull and inspects her with glass-bead eyes when he thinks she isn't looking. The cold of the Frostlands is permanent here, no chance of spring; she has improvised a blanket out of the lining of Jasnah's trunk to cover the worst of her tattered skirt. She tries to make herself useful as a scholar by puzzling over the local flora — short spiky grasses in the leeward of rocks, never-quite-opening rockbuds, tubular brittle shrubs whose tiny raindrop-sized leaves fold in at a touch and which somehow survive highstorms anyway — and ventures, fishing for conversation, that she and Bluth have complementary stupidities. Bluth does not laugh. To a darkeyes her sort of question sounds like a trap.

At the midday halt the second wagon pulls up alongside, driven by Tag with the two marbled-skinned parshmen in its cage quietly weaving reed hats for Tvlakv to sell — work they will continue at without complaint until they are told to do something else, the perfect obedience of which still strikes Shallan as something wrong. Her feet flare with pain the moment she puts weight on them; painspren claw out of the wagon's wall like flayed orange hands. She tells Tvlakv to fasten the wooden sides over the bars of the unused third wagon and turn it into her travelling carriage. He balks; she does not. She takes the key from him herself, has her trunk hauled inside, and the Thaylen backs away half-believing the words she has used at him have been a confusing sort of order he had no choice but to obey.

Crawling on hands and knees to keep her sliced feet off the floor of the converted cage, Shallan opens Jasnah's trunk in the spheres' light and finds Pattern waiting on the inside of the lid, where she had instructed him not to be seen. She tells him aloud what she has decided. Jasnah's notes have to reach the Plains; Urithiru still has to be found; someone has to convince the Alethi that the return of the Voidbringers is no longer theoretical. That night, glimpsing Jasnah for once with her defenses down, Shallan had stopped treating it as an intellectual puzzle, and seeing the marbled parshmen one wagon over reminds her how thin the line is. Someone has to continue Jasnah's work. The someone, Shallan has decided, will be her.

Pattern hesitates and then admits more than he ever has before. The Cryptics worry. One was sent. Him. He came because of the Voidbringers — spren of *Him*, Pattern says of Odium without quite naming him, are stirring, and they are coming. He came to her in particular because of her family and because of the lies; most human minds break under what hers carries, and hers only cracked. The lies are what saved her, Pattern tells her; the lies are what drew him to her. He has no real name she could pronounce — his name is many numbers, hard to say — and so *Pattern* will have to do. He nudges her again, gently, toward the memory she will not look at: not a garden seat this time, but a sterile white room and her father's lullaby and the blood on the floor. She turns away and goes back to washing her feet.

She uses one of Jasnah's immaculate cloths to clean the cuts, picking out grit and watching the painspren rise and recede; no rotspren yet, but she will need antiseptic, and she does not yet know how she will bring herself to ask the slavers for a pair of boots. She sorts the contents of the trunk. It is the one Jasnah kept in her cabin — books and books of meticulous transcriptions of every primary source she had ever consulted, plus a fortune in infused spheres. At the very bottom, folded into a sheet of paper, Shallan finds the first portrait she ever drew of Jasnah — the one she had given her teacher the day she was accepted as her ward, and which she had been sure had been thrown away because Jasnah thought of the visual arts as frivolity. Jasnah had kept it. With her most important things.

The grief Shallan has been folding away arrives all at once. Behind it comes a second grief that feels small beside the first and threatens to drag her down further: every sketchpad she ever kept — her brothers, her father, her mother, the skyeels and creatures and the small private musings on biology that were her life — has sunk with the Wind's Pleasure, along with the broken Davar Soulcaster she had been bringing to Navani to repair for her brothers. Pattern tells her, in his soft buzzing way, that she will draw again — the wind will not stop blowing and she will not stop drawing — and that one cannot keep all lies, only the most important. Shallan names the people who killed Jasnah in the same breath as Kabsal and her father — people who would control the knowledge of the apocalypse so they could profit from it — and resolves, sketchpad of Jasnah tucked safely between the pages of one of Jasnah's own books, to see that they do not.