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Awake before her appointment with Adolin, Shallan sticks every ancient map from Jasnah's trunk to the wall of her room in Sebarial's house with weevilwax, dressing gown still on and hands uncovered, and presses Pattern for a reason every map disagrees with its neighbour. Each one shrinks the cartographer's own country less than it should be and places Urithiru suspiciously near its own kingdom but never inside it, in mountains or hills, with no roads in. Pattern hovers along the wall sounding out the alien script under one of them, recognises the name Bajerden beneath it, guesses at "order" and "draw or make a map," and tells Shallan he can postulate the Dawnchant because the modern scripts are obviously derived from it. Humans, he adds smugly, are bad at patterns; they think abstractly and live by lies. He also sputters when Shallan explains how Vorin scribes write an h sound as a symmetrical letter with a diacritical mark to pretend a word is balanced when it is not.

Shallan cross-checks a Shin scholar's line — that Urithiru was the connection to all nations across stones unhallowed — against Jasnah's annotation about "instantaneous travel and the Oathgates" recorded in *Among the Darkeyed*, and the picture snaps into focus. Jasnah had not come to the Shattered Plains for the city itself, but for an Oathgate entrance hidden somewhere out on the Plains. An ominous chime from the clock interrupts her — she is half an hour from late for Adolin — and she dives into the bath. Sebarial's house, she muses while marvelling at the new warm-water fabrial the artifabrians installed, is a luxury she is going to allow herself to grow very accustomed to. Pattern travels along the wall above the tub, cheerfully curious about female anatomy and lately in the habit of slipping off to watch Sebarial bathe so he can compare; she refuses again to do nude sketches for him.

Dressed and combing her damp hair before the mirror, she remembers her brothers. She has stopped at two Tashikk-linked information stations — one in Valath and another in Northgrip — and paid for letters and a spanreed to be carried by messenger across the Veden succession war to her brothers at the Davar estates, on the chance one route arrives. She means to make a single argument when contact is restored: abandon the estates, take Jasnah's money, come to the Shattered Plains. On her way out she passes Sebarial in his glass-walled solarium eating sweets while Palona lies bare-backed under a masseuse and a young woman reads them poetry; Shallan has been three days deep in Sebarial's tangled ledgers and is determined to put them right. At the door Gaz and the laconic Vathah take their places on the back of Sebarial's coach — borrowed gladly, since Palona swears Sebarial loves an excuse to refuse invitations — while the deserter En climbs up beside the coachman as footman, smiling for the first time since the road.

Behind drawn shades Shallan uses the ride to learn how her Lightweaving actually works. Breathing Stormlight out without a focus does nothing. Holding the picture of herself with black hair in her head shifts her colouring for a heartbeat, then fails. A crude pencil self-portrait — only hair and a hint of features — locks the change in. She turns to a careful sketch of Sebarial from the night before, taken as a Memory at dinner after a scouting trip past Amaram's compound, and as the road keeps smooth she lets the work consume her in the familiar way pencil-on-paper always has. Then she breathes out a Lightwoven copy of him on the seat opposite — sharper than her drawing, with hairs and pores she never put down, but motionless, sightless, breathless. *A statue of light*, Pattern says: a truthful lie. She waves a hand through the figure — slow disturbances small, fast ones smearing it like smoke — then sucks the light back out of it into her skin and the image dissolves. The drawing is the model; the light fills in the rest; she can reclaim it at will. When she lets her own Stormlight run low it tugs itself out of the spheres across the carriage, an instinct she did not know she had. She notes the result in the back of her notebook as the carriage rolls up to the Outer Market.

As En hands her down to the cobbles she weighs augmenting her face with Stormlight — fuller curves, smoother skin, the intricate Alethi braid in place of her plain straight hair — and rules against it. Adolin has already seen her plain; an illusion could not be sustained into a married life; better, for now, to find out what feminine wiles she may actually possess.