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Shallan rides with Sebarial in his carriage out of the king's palace and toward his warcamp. Pattern keeps vibrating happily on the folds of her skirt and she has to keep shushing him. The highprince dozes in the seat opposite, head against the cushion, and the road outside has been scraped clean of rockbuds and divided down the middle with a line of flagstones to separate the lanes. She lets herself, briefly, count what has gone right: her soldiers are safe and following on, she has a base of operations and an income, Navani withdrew from the meeting before the Kholin house could demand Jasnah's things be turned over, and she has only Navani's research-cooperation left to negotiate. Now she only needs to save the world.

Sebarial snorts awake, wipes his cheek, and tells her she has changed — in the meeting he would have placed her at twenty or twenty-five, now she does not look a day above fourteen. She corrects him to seventeen, dry; he grants it is the same difference. He could have sworn her dress was more vibrant and her features sharper a few minutes ago. *Must have been the light.* She asks if he insults all young ladies' looks or only the ones he has just drooled in front of, and he grins back: she was not trained in the court, and he likes that, but she should be careful where she practises it. They pass the gates of his warcamp under his banner of the sebes-and-laial skyeel in deep gold on black; he gives orders for her soldiers to be conducted to the manor when they arrive.

The camp is a warcamp in name only. Straighter streets than a city that has grown naturally, but more civilians than soldiers, taverns and shops and open markets, tall wooden and stone tenements built to share support, rounded roofs and rounded corners his engineers say repel the storms better. Shallan notes the population, and Sebarial — proud of it — tells her almost everyone here is permanent. He has twelve manufactories running already: textiles, shoes, ceramics, several mills, the glassblowers. He grows lavis and tallew and runs hog farms; soon his uniforms will sell cheaper than they can be shipped in, and his food cheaper than Soulcast grain. While the other highprinces chase gemhearts, he has been building an economy. She names him for it — *you sly eel* — and he leans in to confide that he had to be careful at first not to be noticed, that he pays Dalinar's fines for skipping plateau runs and counts it cheap, and that the smarter highprinces have figured him out while the others still take him for a lazy fool. Of course he is a lazy fool, he adds with a chuckle; fighting is too much work and dead soldiers cost him in death-pay to their families. He saw the secret three years back, when everyone moved out here but no one yet thought of the place as permanent. The gemhearts ensured Alethkar would always have a presence on the Plains.

The carriage rolls up to a modest pillared manor among the taller tenements that act as its windbreak — ornamental shalebark beds, a flagstone drive, even some trees — and on the steps stands a short, curly-haired woman with hands on her hips: Palona, Sebarial's Herdazian mistress, dark-eyed but in a fine dress, fingernails with the rocklike cast that gives her people away. Sebarial introduces her as the bane of his existence. *Please tell me you didn't kidnap her, Turi.* He claims Shallan insisted on coming with him; he can't even quite remember her name when Palona asks. They snipe like an old married couple about cooks he has run off, marriage he keeps proposing, the food she will not cook for him, the woman she will not be — she will not marry him because he keeps asking — and *because you love me* (he is, he says, too much of a curmudgeon to love). He retreats inside; Palona pulls Shallan up the steps and asks her quietly what really happened. Shallan, blushing, tells the truth: she is causal-betrothed to Adolin Kholin, she did not want to live under the Kholin roof while she found her feet, and she bullied Sebarial into taking her in by announcing the arrangement publicly along with a generous stipend. Sebarial, skulking inside the door, audibly objects to the size of the stipend. Palona, amused, tells Shallan to confess exactly what figure he was talked into so that she can hold him to it.

Footmen unload Shallan's trunks while Palona leads her into a marble and crystal entryway with a sweeping staircase, and on to a white, silk-hung suite in the eastern wing — soft rugs over hard stone, towels and linens in the closet, a storm-cistern shaped to sift the crem out of the rainwater so that the manor has running water (so long as one avoids the brown morning after a storm). Shallan is *entirely too eager* about the running water, having only first met it in Kharbranth; Palona, deadpan, welcomes her to civilisation and trusts she has left her club and loincloth at the door. Shallan offers thanks. *Winds know, you're not the first stray he's brought home. Some of us even end up staying.*

Alone at last in *her* sitting room, the trunks thumping into place behind the closing door, Shallan takes in the unwanted luxury — the lace and silk reminding her uncomfortably of her father's gifts in atonement for other times she will not let herself remember — and then accepts it. She has eighteen soldiers and five rescued slaves to house and pay out of her stipend, but she is for the first time in months neither hunted, in danger of murder, nor a passenger on someone else's wagon. She sinks into a plush white bed that feels made of air and wishes, and sleeps.