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Six days into the trek north toward the Shattered Plains, Shallan perches on the front seat of her wagon at dusk with her feet bandaged and stinging, having spent most of the day milking knobweed stems for their sap and rubbing it on the cuts to keep the rotspren off — a small private satisfaction, since it means her bookish education has been useful in the wild. She catches Tvlakv in a small obvious lie about his shoes (he is wearing a different pair than he was the first day; he claims to have lost a clothing trunk to a storm) and lets it pass, because by now she knows the slaver does not particularly mind being caught lying. Pattern hums "lies" beside her on the seat. The cook fire is failing — the parshmen are out scouring for more wood, and the next highstorm is probably tomorrow — and Tvlakv settles beside it to whisper with Tag in the dark.

Shallan sends Pattern down the side of the wagon to listen and pulls a small mirror from Jasnah's trunk in the meantime. She looks awful — red eyes, frazzled hair, dress fraying past saving — like a beggar in a fished-out gown, and she does not much care; the question that nags is what Jasnah would have done about it. Jasnah had loathed seduction as a tool — *no different from a man using muscle to bend a woman to his will*, she had said — and yet had been always immaculately turned out, because people respond differently to those who look in control of themselves. Pattern returns and replays the conversation in Tvlakv's and Tag's exact voices, including the crackle of the fire between them. The slaver believes she is somebody important and means to ransom her back to whoever is missing her; it could be what finally digs them out.

Shallan decides this will not stand. Letting Tvlakv keep that frame would put her, in his eyes, only one bad night away from the wretches in his cage. She climbs down on her wounded feet — painspren clawing up briefly around them before fading — and crosses to the fire. *Tag, you are excused.* Tag looks to Tvlakv, who nods, and goes. Shallan tells Tvlakv she knows his men do not agree with his decision to help her; that a betrothal at the Plains will give her a great fortune on arrival; that her safe delivery will be richly rewarded. He smiles, very humbly, that no such reward could possibly cross his mind. He thinks she is lying about the fortune. Her anger rises in a way she recognises from her exchanges with Kabsal — being treated like a plaything, a means — and she leans into the firelight. *Do not toy with me, slaver. You have no idea the storm you have wandered into. Take your petty schemes and stuff them in a crevice. Do as I say and I will see your debts cancelled and you a free man.* He sputters at the specificity.

Standing over him she feels, suddenly, somehow steady. Her insecurities are still there, fluttering under the lie, but the lie is what counts. She has been thinking Jasnah's lesson wrong, she realises in the moment: expectation is not just what others expect of you, but what you expect of yourself. Tvlakv leans away from her as if before a bonfire and raises an arm. She notices, too late, that her dress has shed its tears and stains and that she is faintly aglow with Stormlight from the spheres at her belt — a fact she instinctively wills back down before walking away, hoping he will write it off as firelight. On the way to her wagon she also realises her feet do not hurt nearly as much as they had a minute before, and that the knobweed sap may not be the explanation.

Before she can climb up, Bluth crashes into camp from his scout — *put out the fire* — and overturns the broth pot onto the embers in a hiss of flamespren. Several dozen well-armed men have camped within an easy walk of them. No banners, no sigils, but well-equipped and disciplined, and on foot — no horses, no chulls, so not rich. Deserters, Bluth judges, and he would stake the chulls on it. The countries' law does not reach here; the constant traffic to the Plains — caravans, craftsmen, lowborn sellswords looking to enlist — has drawn exactly the kind of ruffian that takes what it wants and leaves corpses. Tvlakv glances at Shallan still half-shaken by her display, then issues orders to break camp at a run; the dinnerless slaves grumble in their cage, and Shallan flinches at how thin the wall between herself and them really is. The chulls are hooked; Bluth hands her up; Tag curses the parshmen into their wagon and takes the tail.

They roll east rather than north, putting the gully they passed earlier between themselves and the campfires on the hill. The first moon rises lighter than Shallan would like; every crunch of chull foot through the tube-branched crustspines sounds to her like a highstorm's thunder, and a shift of the wind brings her the clink of metal on metal and the sound of distant voices, of men sparring. Bluth, on the seat beside her, tells her unprompted that deserters are worse than common bandits because a deserter has already abandoned every oath and family he had to abandon — there is nothing left in him to bargain with, because he has already given away everything he could care about losing. He says it with the weight of someone who knows what he is talking about, and then falls silent. The caravan crawls eastward at chull pace until, blessedly, the campfires recede into the dark.