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Standing before Dalinar and Navani in the king's conference chamber, Shallan confirms that Jasnah went down with the Wind's Pleasure. The image of herself she had drawn in the palanquin holds her steady. She gives them the careful version: woke to shouting and the smell of smoke, opened her cabin door, watched unfamiliar men stab Jasnah through the heart across the companionway, barricaded herself, used the torch she had taken to set the ship on fire to give the men topside a crisis their attackers had to deal with. She leaves Pattern and the Soulcasting of the hull out. Navani sharpens at the news that her daughter had been alive and unconscious; *you doomed her, Jasnah wouldn't have been able to swim* — Dalinar gently overrides her with a hand on her shoulder, telling her Jasnah had not been unconscious and was beyond saving by then. The tenderness of the touch surprises Shallan; he is, after all, the dead king's brother and Navani's brother-in-law. Navani recovers her composure with effort, apologises to Shallan for straying toward the irrational, and excuses herself.

Dalinar asks after the trip — shipwrecked in the Frostlands? — and Shallan tells him she fell in with a caravan, met bandits, was rescued by a band of timely soldiers whose colours she did not see, and she has already promised them clemency for whatever past crimes they might be running from in recognition of dozens of lives saved. He grunts assent: the king will seal pardons, hanging soldiers always feels like a waste. *One item dealt with.*

Adolin arrives at her elbow with a cup of orange wine, smiling. The causal had been an abstract thing to her when Jasnah first proposed it — alliance, legitimacy, allies for her brothers — and looking at his smile she finds it considerably more dangerous than she had expected. She manages *I like to walk* and, recovering, *Your hair is nice*, since blond is unusual in Jah Keved; he tells her some take it as a mark of impure bloodline, and she tells him so do they about her red. Dalinar clears his throat and packs his son off for wine, then questions her bluntly about her family and her motives. She is frank in return: the family is destitute, her father is dead and the creditors do not yet know, marriage into House Kholin would buy them protection. Asked what she brings, she answers that Jasnah turned away every other ward who approached her for ten years and took *her*; that ought to constitute its own endorsement. Dalinar agrees the causal will stand for now — the original purpose of it, to keep Adolin out of reach of political plays, still applies — and offers her a position as one of his lesser clerks where she can prove herself to him, Navani, and Adolin. The stipend would keep her, but the offer feels like ropes tightening: she would be living under those scarily discerning eyes. His charity would be a prison.

Before she can answer, Highprince Sebarial bellows that they will be eating dinner in here if Dalinar does not start the meeting again, and it is Dalinar — not Elhokar — who calls the room back to order, which Shallan files away. She circles the periphery and counts the room off from Jasnah's notes: Sadeas red-faced and dressed in fashion with his sharp wife Ialai at his elbow, Aladar gambling and friendly with Sadeas (the old enmity broken), Ruthar and his wife and their oily smiles. The notes are out of date; three factions now — Dalinar and the Crown, the Sadeas bloc with Ruthar and Aladar, and Hatham's would-be peacemakers — fight over the smaller neutral highprinces. The argument is over the king's restrictions, but the real issue is how much authority the Crown can demand. Dalinar and Sadeas barely speak, watching each other across the room without blinking. Sebarial sits apart, lobbing obscene one-liners that make the haughty Alethi visibly uncomfortable.

Then Vamah notices the Veden girl at the wall and asks who she is. The whole council turns. Ruthar and Roion — both of whom Jasnah rated as among the less politically savvy — openly invite her to brief them in their warcamps; Hatham and Aladar would have waited until privately. They are not, Shallan realises, after Jah Keved news at all; they want her version of the causal. She gambles on instinct against every rule Jasnah taught her, and announces that *Brightlord Sebarial was the first to offer her a position* — a distant family relation, with a stipend of three full broams a week. Sebarial almost chokes on his wine, then plays along; *can't possibly live with myself if I didn't give her a place to stay.* The other highprinces are horrified at her quip that Uncle Sebarial is *like a very annoying noise that you eventually learn to ignore*, but Sebarial laughs out loud, and Aladar smiles. Ruthar tries to press an invitation; Sebarial cuts him down with an obscene crack about brevity, and Ruthar sputters off.

Dalinar rises and tells the room a parable about a precarious cairn of shale he had found weathered into a stack — pressure from one side only seated the stones together, but pull a single stone out from the bottom and the whole thing comes down. The room stares at him as though he were mad until Sebarial asks what in Damnation he is on about. Their methods, Dalinar says, are not working: years of war and they cannot fight this assassin any better than the night he killed Gavilar; the Veden king put three Shardbearers and half an army against the creature and died with a Blade through the chest. If they cannot defeat the assassin, they must remove his reason for striking, which means going after his employer — the Parshendi. He intends to march his army into the centre of the Shattered Plains either to accept the Parshendi offer of peace delivered the night of the assassin's attack (which makes him wonder whether the Parshendi are being framed) or to find their camp and end them. He will train, send scouts deeper, and equip more Shardbearers. Where will the Shards come from? Adolin, he says without smiling, will be winning them off the other highprinces. Half the room laughs as though it were a joke. Sadeas drawls offers to absorb Dalinar's warcamp once the Parshendi finish him; Adolin half-stands, angerspren pooling at his feet like blood, and Renarin coaxes him back down. The meeting ends with Dalinar, again, having led it.

Sebarial walks Shallan out grumbling about the three broams. Worse, she points out cheerfully, would be to be boring and expensive. She begs a moment, finds the king and personally delivers the news of Jasnah's death (he takes it with regal dignity; Dalinar has clearly already told him), then has the king's scribes draw up a writ of pardon. Outside, she presses it into Vathah's hand — past crimes only, names to follow — and tells the men to behave. *Storms, you actually kept your word?*