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Five and a half years before the main story, eleven-year-old Shallan sits in a new blue silk dress on the dais of the dining hall at Davar Manor while maids and parshmen scrub the floors and polish the furniture for guests her father has not named. Her left cuff at last clips closed over her safehand — she is old enough now to cover it. The dress is the only real colour in the room. She has not spoken in the five months since her mother died, and the maids talk past her as though she is not there — one new woman is told in a whisper that the poor child was in the room when the master killed his own wife and her lover. Shallan hears it all and lets her mind go still, the way she has learned to, like a candle snuffed.

Her eldest brother Nan Helaran enters tall and square-chinned, a small bundle under his arm. He squats beside her chair and gives her a leather satchel he ordered for her in Northgrip — thick drawing paper, the expensive kind, and a set of charcoal pencils. He has missed her drawings. She undoes the satchel with shaking hands, picks up a pencil for the first time in months, and starts to draw. He asks her to come back to him, and tells her, more softly, that he will be away a great deal in the coming years; he needs her to watch the others, especially Balat, who has not been kind to the axehound pup Helaran gave him. The pencil moves on its own. When he turns to leave he sees what she has drawn — bodies, facedown — and crumples the page. *Draw plants and animals,* he tells her. *Safe things.* They cannot have vengeance yet; Balat cannot lead the house and he himself must be away. Soon, though.

Brightlord Davar crashes the door open — a big bearded man in deliberately old-fashioned Veden dress, an ulatu under a tight robe — bellowing about the carriage Helaran has had prepared without his leave. He follows three parshmen carrying baskets into the hall, jabbing his finger at his son. Helaran calls him a murderer to his face. When Davar advances, threatening to have his own heir imprisoned, mist gathers in Helaran's hand and a Shardblade forms there — some six feet long, thick and curved, its back edge rising in shapes like wavering flames or rippling water, a gemstone set at the pommel. *Shardbearer,* Shallan understands, with no idea how or when. Helaran hops from the dais and sets the point against his father's chest. Davar goes white and raises his hands. *I should shove this through your chest,* Helaran tells him calmly; it would be a mercy. He starts to twist the wrist.

*No,* Shallan whispers — the first word she has spoken in months. *Please.* Helaran cocks his head, laughs a wild bark, and pulls the Blade back. Davar, sinking into a chair, asks aloud where he could possibly have come by such a weapon — and guesses that whoever Helaran is now riding with handed it to him as a token of trust. Helaran does not deny it; he tells Shallan only that the work he is now doing is important and that he will tell her of it someday, that it is good to hear her voice. He lays a fond hand on her shoulder, asks her to draw fanciful things and brighter days for him while he is gone, and walks out promising he will come back periodically to keep Father from ruining too much.

The remaining maids flee through the garden door. Brightlord Davar roars, picks up his chair, and slams it into the wall. He smashes the others one at a time into the floor with brutal blows, breathing hard. Then he turns his eyes on his daughter cowering in her chair with the satchel of paper clutched against her chest. The rage, the lack of humanity in those eyes, settles on her and slowly recedes; some part of him comes back. He drops the broken chair, turns his back on her as if ashamed, and flees the room.