POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan is riding the lead wagon beside Tyn a day out from the Shattered Plains when a sudden flare of red and yellow against the brown-and-green canvas of the Frostlands catches her eye and pulls her to her feet — vivid enough that she breaks off the sphere-palming Tyn is making her practise. Tyn cannot even see it at first; Shallan borrows her spyglass, identifies a rock overhang sheltering a thicket of plants from the storms, and bullies the caravan into a detour. Macob is reluctant but yields. Divergent flora in an otherwise uniform ecosystem is, Shallan insists, very much worth a detour. *Kid, you're kind of strange,* Tyn tells her.
The thicket turns out to be a tiny lait — short bone-white trees with red leaves, vines draping the rock wall, rockbuds open even without rain pushing tongue-like tendrils after water, a small dark green pond and a moss-shaded edge. A pack of small feral axehounds scatters at her approach. Shallan sets a blanket on a boulder by the pond, sketches a glyph-prayer in the name of her namesake Shalash (Herald of Beauty), and breathes in the humid leaf-shadow. Around her the plants relax, petals stretching back out, leaves unfurling — *nature blushing*, she thinks. Bright orange eels ripple the pond and slap a tail in Gaz's face when he kneels for a look.
Gaz has come to her shyly to ask for a portrait — the same gift she gave Glurv earlier, the sixth of the former deserters to ask. She draws him idealised: paunch smoothed, uniform crisp, expression looking up and forward; the eye patch becomes noble, the scarred face wise, the night around the fires when the caravan workers thanked them living quietly in the background details. He nearly weeps. Pattern hums beside her — a lie, he says, and a truth, since that is in fact how the people Gaz saved had looked at him. She asks herself, looking back through the sketchbook to those drawings she did of herself as scholar, courtier, and artist on the wagon out of Tvlakv's caravan, which she means to be — and whether she can be them all.
She works on as the shadows lengthen, with lifespren settling like green motes among the leaves and Pattern out on the pond's surface quietly counting the leaves of a tree. She catches herself drawing the rocky shore where the Wind's Pleasure went down, with shadowy figures helping each other from the surf — one of them, she is sure, Yalb. A wish she will probably never get to verify. She turns the page and finds her pencil has produced a stranger image: a woman crouched over a wooden or stone figure on the ground, hammer and chisel poised above its face. She cannot say why she has drawn it. Vathah lurks at the treeline watching her work and sneers; Pattern mutters *trouble, yes, trouble*. She knows.
Tyn finds her at the pond as the sun touches the horizon and uses the visit to warn her this is her last chance to back out — tomorrow they reach the warcamps, and the kind of work Tyn is training her for is the kind that wrenches the soul. Shallan, in her opinion, is not broken; she draws criminals into heroes and blushes at racy hints, and however bad she thinks she has had it, what is coming is worse. Shallan commits aloud — a lie — and then gives Tyn the secret at last: Dalinar Kholin's son Adolin is in a Veden causal betrothal to a woman who will not arrive when expected, and Shallan looks like her. Tyn is impressed — bold but attainable, a *pretty face* love-con rather than the blackmail she had feared, much safer for a beginner. She kills Shallan's opening move flat: do not accept Kholin hospitality, do not look needy, set up in another warcamp and play unobtainable. Adolin is a notorious flirt who has been all-but-engaged a dozen times; keeping his attention is the real challenge. Shallan feels a spike of genuine fear at how easily the betrothal could collapse without Jasnah there to push for it, and quietly resolves to keep Tyn in the dark on the actual plan — she has no intention of defrauding the Kholins she means to make her allies toward Urithiru and the Voidbringers. Yet another thing to juggle. She finds, oddly, that she is excited by it, and turns back to her sketchpad for one more drawing before food.