POV: shallan
Summary
Five years before Shallan sails for Kharbranth, a teenage Shallan sketches a feeler-twitching cremling on a chunk of sturdy shalebark in the trimmed gardens of Davar Manor in Jah Keved. She sits well clear of the flowerbeds — they make her sneeze — and uses a borrowed copy of Dandos the Oilsworn's drawing book that her father happened to own, open beside her for instruction, and the dwindling stack of paper her brother Helaran left her the last time he passed through. She longs, lately, to be somewhere the plants are not pruned into careful shapes and the people do not move as if afraid of starting a rockslide; she suspects writers who romanticise the great isolated manors of Veden country life have never actually spent a season inside one. The estate around her is set-dressing — a deliberate piece of pretty staged quiet meant to keep her from listening to the shouting in the house.
A yell from the manor makes her hand jerk and streak the page. She sets the pencil down and loses track of time staring at the blank sheet — that happens to her sometimes. When she comes back to herself the sky is darkening, and she packs her satchel and walks back inside to dress for her father's feast. There will be a new dress laid out and she will be expected to sit silent through the meal; Father has never said so, but she suspects he regrets her speaking at all.
On the stairs she goes blank again, standing in the hall staring at the wall, until her fourth brother Van Jushu catches her there — half-drunk, jacket askew, hair mussed, the cufflinks and belt with their fine glowing gemstones gambled away again. The yelling earlier, he tells her, was about Balat, who has been starting fires and nearly burned the servants' building down. Jushu declares himself, slurring and bitter, the only Davar with any sense left. Helaran is never home and very nearly killed Father the last time he was; for all that, Father still loves only Helaran and there will be a new dress for her and curses for Jushu. He calls her broken — ruined by what she saw the night Father killed Mother.
She steadies him by the elbow and walks him toward his room. They pass Father's chambers — the heavy stumpweight door left ajar a crack while a maid tidies inside — and on the far wall, hung over the strongbox, is a painting of a storm at sea. Through the canvas, to her eyes only, the lockbox blazes as if a lamp burns inside it; the outline of it shows clean through the painted clouds and waves. She stops short and her grip on Jushu tightens. *What in the Halls are you staring at, girl,* he demands, squinting at the painting and seeing nothing of the light at all. *It really did ruin your mind, didn't it.* He pulls away and lurches off down the hall cursing softly about being the only one in the family who has not gone storming crazy. Shallan stays standing alone in the hallway, staring into the light no one else can see. Whatever is in that box, she thinks, is a monster. Her mother's soul.