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Shallan wakes the morning after killing Tyn in Tyn's own tent and inventories what is left of her: not the frightened girl from a broken home, not the naive thief who had tried to steal from Jasnah Kholin, not the woman taken in by Kabsal or Tyn. Frightened and naive still, both, but also tired of being shoved and misled. With Tvlakv she had pretended she could lead; this morning she no longer feels the need to pretend. She kneels at a locked trunk and asks Pattern to slip inside. He shrinks to the size of her thumbnail, oozes through the keyhole, sees a pattern in the lock-tumblers, pushes here and there with the little strength he has on this side, and the lid clicks open. The trunk yields a fine embroidered dress with a modern cut (loose through the bust, but acceptable) and a bag of spheres. She does her face at the mirror with Tyn's makeup and brushes, and emerges feeling, for the first time in months, like a true lighteyed woman.

Out in the wagon camp her men work alongside Macob's parshmen breaking down camp. Vathah reports they burned Tyn and her soldiers' bodies in the night as instructed, but a patrol passed by this morning and the caravan workers cannot be relied on to keep silent about bones in the ashes. She tells him to gather the bones into a sack — *had she really just said that?* — and Vathah, no longer doubting that she keeps her promises to the deserters, smiles and goes to settle the men. Macob bows lower than he ever has — word of the Shardblade has travelled. He pays out of his own purse for the courier and the palanquin, says he hopes never to see her again, and rolls away. Pattern, riding on the back of her dress, asks earnestly whether nonexistence is really so fascinating to humans, since Tyn's soldiers had talked of little else last night before they died; she promises the day will get more interesting and walks him through the idiom *keep your ears open*, which he tries on as a delicious new lie.

The hired palanquin carries her down between the ten compact warcamp cities and into a press of caravans and banners that staggers her. Behind her vehicle march Vathah and the deserters, then her five rescued slaves carrying the trunks, all dressed up off the merchants' stock but unable to mask the smell of months of slave-marching washed only by highstorms. She has Tyn's perfume; she still hopes she does not stink, and lists what she must do next: discover what Jasnah sought on the Plains, persuade the Alethi leadership to take measures against the parshmen, penetrate the people Tyn had been meeting with and learn what they know of Urithiru without giving up her family. The irony of being carried into the warcamps on the backs of Voidbringers is not lost on her. Dalinar Kholin is her best hope of a patron and she frets aloud about how he will receive her now that Jasnah is dead, while a sleepy Pattern hums beside her.

Vathah returns from a scout: Dalinar is at the king's palace, every highprince with him, and there are too many patrols out — something has happened. Take me to the king, then, she says. Vathah, leaning in, asks quietly whether she means to kill him — a Blade summoned at arm's reach would do it — and admits he would not mind if she did; the king has only made things worse for Alethkar since he took the throne. She promises she will not. As the palanquin climbs the switchbacks of the palace hill she pulls Tyn's satchel onto her knees, finds the crinkled sketch of Bluth as a hero, and starts drawing in the lurching cabin. Not a Memory this time but an imagined self: a confident Shallan standing tall before Dalinar in Plate, hand raised, no trembling. *This is what I would have been if I had not been raised in a household of fear. So this is what I will be today.* Not a lie. A different truth. When she steps onto cold rock at the gate she realises she has drawn in a thread of Stormlight without meaning to.

She brings Vathah and Gaz up the wide steps to the palace doors and has Vathah announce her, on her cue, as ward of Jasnah Kholin and causal betrothed of Adolin Kholin. Sixteen guards stand at the gate — Elhokar's paranoia — and they let her pass on her bearing alone before one belatedly thinks to ask who. They climb through the narrowing palace, asking timid servants for the way, and the timidity reminds her of the household she grew up in. Outside the king's conference chamber the corridor is jammed with the colours of every highprince — Sadeas, Thanadal, Aladar, Ruthar, and Dalinar's smaller knot of mostly darkeyed guards standing apart in evident hostility.

A tall darkeyed officer in a knee-length blue coat turns, looks her over, and walks directly to her: it is the soldier she swindled out of his boots two days outside the warcamps — Kaladin — now captain of Dalinar's guard, demanding to know whether Prince Adolin is engaged to a Horneater. She drops the accent, claims her real identity. Kaladin then recognises Gaz from the lumberyards he once worked under, names him as a rat who had tried to get him killed on multiple occasions, and has his men haul Gaz off. He tells Shallan flatly that Adolin's betrothed went down with a ship off the Frostlands and that an opportunist riding in on Kholin grief is bound for a cell. She offers him a sheet from Jasnah's notes — a spanreed copy of the causal correspondence Jasnah and Navani had run between them — and asks that he take it to Highlady Navani in the chamber.

Then they lose their tempers at each other. The argument runs through every insult either of them can find about face, breath, ancestry and intelligence: Horneater princess and sponge-hair, asinine and offensive on his own time, chulls kept clear of her, parents that want nothing to do with him, dungeons and hangmen and chewing shells. Soldiers begin snickering. At her last cut about his ancestors, his eyes widen — she has touched something raw — and he snaps about her parentage; she snaps about his. The corridor goes silent and most of the people in it are staring. Kaladin shakes off her hand (she had kept hold of his sleeve since she first wanted his attention), pronounces her unmistakably a high lighteyed lady because only those are capable of being this infuriating, and stalks toward the chamber doors with the paper. Vathah, alarmed, whispers that picking a shouting match with the head of Dalinar's guard was unwise; she answers that an incident is now guaranteed to reach Dalinar's ears whatever Kaladin does, which is the point — but admits she is not that clever and it would have worked anyway. The doors crack as the meeting breaks; Kaladin comes back out with annoyed resignation, thumbs her toward the doorway, and his guards let her pass while restraining Vathah. She waves Vathah back, takes a breath, and walks in.