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Four days into the combined caravan's run toward the Shattered Plains, with the corridor opening into safer country, Shallan sits at a travel table outside her wagon while Gaz — eye-patched, scar-faced, with a nervous sideways tic — sands its old slave-cage frame into a proper closed wagon and fits a hinged window into one side. Red, lanky and bearded, keeps him company on the wagon bed and tells her how Highprince Vamah's call to arms rolled through Farcoast like a bad smell — every second man of age joined up, and he came with five friends now rotting in the chasms. Gaz, hammering in a hinge, says they left because the Alethi highprinces had stopped fighting to win; they were dying so a handful of lighteyes could grow rich on gemhearts. Red needles him about the debts and the men who would have made him a bridgeman, and Gaz cuts him off — that life is gone, Shallan said everything would be forgiven. *Except your breath,* she adds, and he reddens and finally laughs.

Vathah passes through carrying a bowl of dark peppery curry from the dinner cauldron, mocks Gaz for kissing the new mistress's feet, and warns Shallan that her *heroes* are crem — words will not change them or the trouble waiting at the end of the road. She traps him in a small storm of insults until he wanders off, and reminds herself privately that she is dancing around the truth as much as the historians she has been ranting at: she has no illusion about how fast these men could turn coats in the wrong circumstance, only a determination to keep her promise. She returns to Jasnah's notes on the ten Alethi highprinces, measuring Sadeas, Aladar (a gambler who might risk an expedition for Urithiru if the riches were dangled right), and Hatham as possible allies, and writing off Thanadal as oily, Bethab as a dullard, and Sebarial as outrageously rude. She is also thinking, separately, about how to free her brothers from her father's debts — buy a Soulcaster from the king, distract the Ghostbloods — though everything depends on her getting to the Plains and salvaging the Adolin betrothal first.

As the sun lowers, Pattern surfaces in the woodgrain of her table. She is rubbing her temples at how much these *scholars* contradict each other; he hums that truth is individual. The table has four legs, she insists; he answers that without a perspective there is no leg and no table, only wood — the table *believes* itself a table only because people have considered it long enough that the idea has taken hold. The shape of his answers makes her wonder how much of it is the Cognitive Realm talking through him. Then, very small, he says he does not think his kind would live in a world that had only the Voidbringers in it — they have spren of their own. She sits up sharp. He shrinks, ridges mashing together, and tells her in a whine that spren are shattered power given thought by the perceptions of people, broken off from Honor, Cultivation, and — forcing the word out — Odium. She writes furiously. She remembers in passing that he raved through last night's highstorm in a language none of the soldiers sheltering with her could understand, and that they had taken it for the kind of thing that happens in a storm.

One of her debt-slaves, Suna, comes timidly through the dusk to deliver Tyn's invitation to dinner — distinct from her brand-slaves Gaz and Red in that he wears the forehead tattoos of a man who entered servitude willingly to clear his debts, and is frightened by the pittance she has promised him, which would see him freed in under two years. She asks Red to put her table back in the wagon and lock it, and goes.

Tyn's tent is large and well lit, the perimeter cleared by her remaining guards. The lighteyed woman eats peppery men's curry without apology — she was raised in Tu Bayla by translator parents and never learned to care about which foods are for whom — and tells Shallan she has a spanreed paired to one of the new Tashikk information houses, where for a fee an intermediary will run inquiries and forward them on the spanreed network. Her research turned up a small, debt-burdened Veden house, an erratic head who may or may not still be alive, and an unmet daughter named Shallan. She has decided to be impressed instead of annoyed: she reads Shallan as a new but talented confidence trickster pretending several steps above her name, and points out — accurately — that the trickiest part of a long con is the end, when the *heroes* you have recruited are happy to string you up if the payoff fails. She offers to mentor Shallan in the art and broker her access to the warcamp contacts she will need to land big. The fee is in: whatever Shallan is really after, Tyn wants a share. Pressed for the secret, Shallan gives her only that she knows something important about old Blackthorn Kholin; Tyn takes that as blackmail and asks if she is signing on, and Shallan — who knows she is being read by someone much more practiced than she is, and that her one accidental con on this woman is the only reason she is still at this table at all — agrees that she has things to learn.