POV: shallan
Summary
Three and a half years before Shallan sails for Kharbranth, the fourteen-year-old Shallan threads the Middlefest Fair at her father's heel. A Thaylen merchant proudly displays a feathered Shin "chicken" that croaks its own name; Shallan flinches with her safehand to her chest, certain a Voidbringer has been let loose at the booth, and pities the talking creature trapped in its cage even as the merchant laughs at her terror. She trails Father through a crush of strangers — more people in one basin than she has ever seen — past jella trees burning orange under broad tied-up canopies and parshmen carrying water for the boxes. He scolds her gawking, warns her she is nearly of an age to be married, and threatens to stop bringing her to such events. She nods and pictures the last tutor's bruised retreat after one of Father's episodes, and resolves privately to slip away as soon as she can.
At the dueling ground — a roped-off circle of sand under canopies — she takes her seat beside her stepmother Malise just as Brightlord Revilar climbs into the box uninvited, two master-servants at his back in black-and-white. Silver-haired, with a wooden nose painted black where a youthful duel took the original, he settles into the chair that would have been Helaran's and slides a contract across the table. The terms are obscene: Father is to hand over breechtree cotton and raw shum at a clearmark a bag — a tenth of value — so Revilar can pose as a financial genius for the highprince, who has just begun inviting him to court one week in ten. Father mutters that everywhere he steps he finds only corners, then bows his head over the wine. Revilar glances at Shallan and asks whether the child needs to be present; she is dismissed without a word, slipping out past the cooks.
Freedom, Shallan thinks, is worth an emerald broam in this house. She has work to do. She rounds the boxes and hisses at Eylita Tavinar across a railing, collecting a perfumed lavender note the older girl has already written, then sets off into the fair proper. Lower-ranked lighteyes — tenners drinking at long tables, almost indistinguishable from darkeyes — make her stomach twist, and she clutches her satchel tight. The family guard Jix catches up to her, yamma root in his cheek, and, when she refuses to be sent back, reluctantly escorts her to the patched canvas of the gambling pavilion. Inside, where women wear gloves with the fingers cut out and men forgo bows, she forces herself through the dark and the sour air to a bench where her second brother Tet Balat sits watching axehound fights with hungry eyes. She presses Eylita's note into his hand. He startles, ashamed, then jogs from the pavilion toward the fairground stream a changed man. Shallan sits trembling on a rock after — proud and ashamed in equal measure — and notes only in passing that her twin brother Jushu was never inside.
Back at the box she finds Father with a new visitor: tall, slender, jet-haired, blue-eyed, dressed all in black, of a dahn so low he cannot produce a writ of lineage. Malise whispers that the stranger claims to bring word of Helaran. Shallan watches him almost drop his cup at the sight of her, then recover into practiced indifference. As he rises to leave, she catches him pour a pouch of powder into his own drink and gulp it down; he gives her a smile and is gone without bowing. Father, face thunderous, declares aloud that he has only three sons — Helaran is disinherited, his name not to be spoken, Tet Balat now Nan, Wikim now Tet, Jushu now Asha. He confides that Wikim has refused to leave the carriage all day, and asks Shallan to go to him; he is afraid of what he would do himself.
In the shade of jella trees above the carriage yard, Shallan climbs in across from her thin, sickly middle brother and offers him sheets of Father's highstorm-timing equations she has spent weeks transposing into glyphs so a man may read them. Wikim tells her flatly that she cannot fix any of them: Jushu will destroy himself, Balat is becoming Father step by step, Malise weeps every other night, and he will be dead before any of it finishes. He calls the math gift stupid. She scrambles from the carriage in tears and sits on a stone, hiding her face from passing coachmen.
The black-clad stranger is waiting in a jella tree above her, leaves pulling in around him in a wave of vanishing red and orange. He has watched her hand off the note and the equations both. He asks her gently whether spren speak to her and whether her spheres go dark when she is near; her thoughts flash to lights drained from globes, twisted symbols she should not see, her mother's soul in a box, and she turns him away. He answers anyway — her father is slowly tearing her family apart — then nods her toward the carriage window. Inside, Wikim hunches over her math problems with her pencil, smiling. A long-forgotten warmth opens in her chest. The stranger tells her a parable of two blind men weighing whether beauty can be taken from a man, then asks her for the most beautiful thing she can imagine. She offers a polite answer — a painting — and he names it a lie, so she gives the real one: a morning that never happened, with her mother alive in the garden, her brothers laughing, Helaran never gone. Wisps of Stormlight curl from the spheres in his palm and begin to draw the scene in the air around her until she nearly steps into it. She pulls back. He tells her she does not yet understand the nature of lies, that the Shards here are very strict, and that she must see truth before she can expand on it. Asked again where Helaran is, he says only Alethkar — where her brother has decided he is needed — and bows, walking away on light feet, dance-smooth, leaving her aware only after he has gone that she never asked his name.