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Three years before Shallan sails for Kharbranth, a fifteen-year-old Shallan sits in the Davar manor gardens with her brothers Balat and Wikim and Wikim's axehound Sakisa tumbling after a cloth ball. Balat leafs through her sketchbook praising her work past their dead mother's, then admits he had stepmother Malise read his latest letter from Eylita Tavinar because it was too private for his fourteen-year-old sister. Wikim — visibly less scrawny these past four months, never far from his mathematics, and now (over their father's protest that the work was unmanly) a hopeful candidate for the ardentia — needles him about how racy the letters might be, and angerspren pool under Balat's feet until Shallan turns the conversation into a parlour-game of absurd similes for love. She caps it with an off-colour double meaning about a too-short melody that lays Wikim out laughing and pulls shamespren up under Balat; her own thrill at having been improper surprises her. A carriage rattles up the drive without hoofbeats and Balat goes inside to see who. Wikim holds Shallan back, presses a small pouch into her hand — blackbane leaves, paralysing, breath-stopping, a poison he has carried close for nearly a year and now feels he no longer needs — and thanks her, saying she sees what she has been doing for him and it is working.

Indoors, Shallan finds her fourth brother Jushu — grown plump from his bouts of excess — kneeling bound and bleeding before Father in the hall, with three men in old-style ulatu and loose coats waiting payment of nearly a hundred emerald broams of gambling debt. Their smooth-voiced leader Mill is darkeyed and does not sound it. Guards Ekel and Jix flank Father with hands on weapons; he bellows that Jushu was meant to be riding the outer holdings, not gambling away their name, then declares the boy theirs and storms out. Balat refuses to act — Jushu prepared this pyre himself — as Jushu is dragged sobbing for the carriage. In the study, Shallan glimpses ledgers thick with letters of debt an order of magnitude beyond anything she has ever helped tally, and presses her father: is this all because of Revilar's extortion? It is bigger than that. Father grabs her by the arms in a painful grip and growls that he has done all of this for her and there will be no more weakness; he catches himself only when she whimpers, glances upward toward the room that holds her mother's soul, drops her, and confines her to her room. In the hall she presses her back to the wall, then remembers the stranger's words about cutting at the thorns. She runs back to the feast hall. Balat knocks his wine cup over rushing to her, ready to go to the highprince if Father has hurt her; she asks instead for the dagger their father gave him. Wikim silently lays his own at the table's edge.

Out on the cobbled road she catches the chull-drawn carriage with the two knives and her thin aluminium necklace. The enforcer values the daggers at twenty broams and the necklace — only Soulcastable aluminium — at ten, together half the debt. Mill (who once killed his own brother for cheating him) considers: a defaulter kept alive is sometimes a useful deterrent. Shallan argues him into the corner of his own profession — a man who profits from the gambling of others does not himself gamble — and, when he asks for one reason to grant mercy, gives him a single fact: the night their mother was killed, Jushu held her while she cried. Mill tosses the necklace back, keeps the daggers, has Jushu cut loose with one eye already swelling shut, and tells her to teach him caution. She kneels and unties his bloodied hands; he asks dazedly whether Mill really took so little for him, and she says Mill did not know his true worth. Balat meets them halfway and takes Jushu under his arm, weeping with him.

Inside the manor, Shallan climbs the stairs past her father's lit door and sits on her bed to wait for the highstorm. Shouts rise from below. The door opens onto Father standing over the serving maid Minara crumpled in the hall, one arm bent wrong, blood smeared along the wall as she tries to crawl. He steps in, shuts the door, and tells Shallan softly that he would never hurt her — he has settled on a method of self-management: vent the anger and assign its blame to whoever provoked it. He would not want to have to punish anyone else because of her. The objection that he forbade her only to *leave* her room and not to fail to reach it dies on her lips; they both know she disobeyed. He runs his hand through her hair, thanks her, and goes.