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Shallan, wearing her Lightwoven darkeyed face under Tyn's white coat and Bluth's folded white hat, walks into Sebarial's warcamp after dark and discovers that being plain-looking is itself a freedom; for the first time, even in a busy market, almost no one bothers to look at her. She has to remind herself not to wait for darkeyed strangers to defer; she goes around them and is pushed and jostled instead, and she loves the warm chaos of it — puppet shows, a Herdazian making bursts of flame from oil, glazed fruit on sticks. She catches herself wanting to stop and sketch half the people; the urge to sketch is also, she realises, her defence against doing something frightening. She buys a candied-fruit stick from a vendor by accidentally producing an emerald mark — two hundred and fifty times the price — to a vendor who blinks, then pockets it and politely calls her *citizen*, the title for a high-nahn darkeyes. The vendor gives her directions to Nar Street six blocks back through the market and warns her, even as a darkeyes, that it is not a part of camp a *young lady* should be visiting alone. Shallan sets Pattern to drop off her coat and follow a distance behind, watching for tails.

Nar Street turns out to be five blocks rather than six. The tenement she has been sent to is somehow already ancient — five-year-old stone weathered, shutters askew — and the door is opened by an enormous darkeyed man with a Horneater beard, a touch of red in the hair, and a big axe leaning where he can reach it. He waves her in; she ribs him for the *creepy staircase* in the décor, which gets a smile out of him, and is sent down a stone stair through old crem dribbles that pre-date the Alethi presence on the Plains (the warcamp craters once held people — Natans, she guesses). At the bottom is a small empty room. One corner of the floor opens on a pulley-trapdoor onto a ladder dropping into a red-carpeted, palatial chamber. A long dining table set with gemstone-studded goblets fills the centre. The shelves are stacked with curious trophies in glass cases, the smoke from the hearth at the back wall climbing into a fabrial that gathers it like a spool gathering thread.

A jet-black-haired man in immaculate white stands at the hearth — refined suit, light violet eyes, an old scar deforming his upper lip, a crooked right hand from once-broken fingers. He reminds her, queasily, of a kind messenger from her childhood (*two blind men waited at the end of an era*). He turns with a long reed at his lips and looses a dart that passes inches from her face and thuds into the figures of a hanging tapestry-target on the wall behind her. He asks, in an unplaceable accent, whether *Tyn* is unwell. She says yes, then revises when the lie does not land — Tyn judged it prudent to send her apprentice after a sloppy implementation of the Jasnah hit. He gestures and a spindly rat-toothed lighteyes places a sack of glowing broams on the table: tell him where Tyn is and she may take it. Sweating, fearspren curling up from the floor beside her, Shallan refuses on the grounds that a thief who would sell out her own mistress is worthless to him. *Honor? From a thief?* *I am no mere thief.* He threatens torture for sport — *for one thing, it would be fun* — and she gambles, nodding at the trophies in their cases, that he does not throw away useful things. He turns to his cup and, after a long pause, accepts her. She sits down on the nearest chair and finds her legs gone.

Beside her, soundlessly, has appeared a short tan-skinned woman in dark brown with an intricate carapace belt and a red-orange carapace mask grown into the skin at its edges, exposing only mouth, chin and unblinking dark eyes. Shallan stifles a blush at her unsleeved safehand. The scarred man in white tells her, eventually, that he had been intending to kill her and hunt Tyn down; he is not angry that Tyn failed to retrieve the information from Kholin — he hired the best hunter for the job and accepted the risks, and the target is dead. What he cannot abide is Tyn's cowardice in not coming herself. *You are not a coward. She sent someone she knew I would not kill. She has always been clever.* He names himself Mraize, a title he tells her she may use; she gives the name she has been toying with, Veil. He has a job. Brightlord Meridas Amaram, Shardbearer of Sadeas's court, is Mraize's current prey, but Amaram's life belongs to another; Veil is to investigate his manor near Sadeas's palace, learn his secrets, and not harm him or alert anyone. Tyn is to report back by Chachel of next week and Mraize's disappointment will fade. Closing the meeting he sets down his cup; on the middle finger of the crooked right hand is the golden signet ring with the three-diamond symbol Jasnah once drew for her — the Ghostbloods — the same symbol her steward had carried and Kabsal had tattooed on his body. She does not haggle the payment — *one does not haggle at the finest winehouses.* She climbs back up the ladder with Mraize's eyes following her, and a final dart passing under her foot through the rungs and into the wall as the trapdoor closes.

Outside the tenement she scrambles down the steps and into the busy late-night street. She has done this with no actual plan beyond *learn what they know about Urithiru and call them off her brothers*; she does not yet see how she pries any of that out of Mraize. Pattern reports a tail — the masked woman, now in a black cloak. Shallan tries to Lightweave a second image over herself on the move — a large man, anything — and produces only a useless puff of Stormlight; the magic needs a sketch to obey. Drawing detailed faces while walking is impossible, but a *wall* she can manage. She scratches a quick stone wall on the back of her map, ducks into a doorway recess in a side alley (almost tripping over a shoeless drunk), and breathes the image out over the opening. Everything goes black; she presses back against the door, holds her breath, hears boots scrape past her on the alley stone. Pattern slips out and reports the masked woman gone. She steps through her own wall in a swirl of Stormlight, watches it shatter to smoke as her Light runs out, and finds her red hair returned with her disguise. The darkeyed Veil could walk about with a gloved safehand; Shallan herself cannot. She sheds the coat and the hat to be a third person again and walks back to the manor by the alleyway opposite, navigating off a quick sketch of the route — *the warcamp is a place, something I can draw,* a kind of pattern she can see where the letter-code on the spanreed had been invisible to her.

She climbs back in her ground-floor window, snaps the drapes closed, and throws herself on the bed trembling — and discovers, smiling at the ceiling, that she enjoyed it. The tension, the talking her way out of being shot, even the chase. When she had tried to steal from Jasnah every part of the experience had made her sick. She is not that girl anymore. She still needs an alliance with the Kholins and the easiest road is keeping Prince Adolin interested without looking desperate; that part of the work is likely to be the most pleasant of the lot. She rolls off the bed to see if any of Palona's food remains.