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Up a hill-cut stairwell from the Outer Market Shallan steps onto a fashionable terrace winehouse with ironwork tables facing east toward the Origin — a frightening arrangement, since the storms come the same way — and a sealed inner room off to one side for the lighteyes' bodyguards. A master-servant in black and white addresses her as Brightness Davar without needing the introduction; she lets her own guards go off to the bodyguard room and notes parshmen in the corner moving wine bottles at their patient implacable pace. Adolin is already at the marble rail with a folio of Liafori and Azish men's fashions oversized so it cannot be mistaken for a woman's book, two of his father's guards posted apart from the others; he closes the folio and stands when he sees her. Her resolve to be poised and refined survives exactly until his smile.

Adolin makes an unselfconscious joke about Sebarial producing a loud and inappropriate noise at one of the king's meetings, then pushes in her chair himself instead of letting the servant do it. They open the menu: he confesses he picks wine by colour because Renarin is the one who actually understands them, then orders something light because a plateau run could in theory be called even today. Shallan starts a sentence about the run and learns — too late to stop her hands tightening on the table — that they are here to watch a highstorm. The room with the doors is for fleeing into at the last moment. The crowd around them is the new fashion. She forces her fingers off the wood, declines Adolin's offer to retreat early, and refuses to look east.

Casting for safe ground she asks how plateau runs are called; he describes spotters with great spyglasses and starts a well-worn story about leaping a chasm to clear bridge ground, and the day he was stranded alone after Father's greave cracked. Shallan derails him by asking, in earnest, what a Shardbearer does when nature calls inside Plate. He stares, asks whether she is Wit in a wig, and reluctantly admits to three deliberate occasions, then bellows out the first genuine laugh she has heard from him when she suggests the men who clean his armour are braver than he is. He pulls his chair closer and asks what other secrets she wants to know.

She gets out paper and sketches the chrysalises she has read about from her father's books with a man drawn beside them for scale, then matches the chasmfiend cocoon by Adolin's description to the cocoon of the yu-nerig — a Marabethian aquatic greatshell that comes ashore only to pupate, and is famously used to dispose of criminals. She lays out the consequence he has not seen: the warcamps are not hunting greatshells but harvesting their juveniles, roughly a hundred and fifty a year, and apex greatshells of that size cannot sustain that. He concedes that fewer have been pupating lately. She suggests breeding them in batches like chulls and asks for what she needs — an uncut chrysalis, an adult corpse-view, ideally a captured juvenile — out on the Plains. He thinks he can arrange most of it: Dalinar has promised Jasnah a corpse-view, and Amaram has been pressing to see deeper Plains terrain than a plateau run allows.

She asks about the duels. Adolin gives her the whole shape of it — Dalinar's visions of a unified Alethkar against a coming storm, his desire to bring the Knights Radiant back (which makes her glance for Pattern in alarm), the betrayal at the Tower, his rescue by a lowly bridge crew (the part he is plainly embarrassed by) — and his own charge from his father: win Shardblades off the highprinces by duel until the camps fear him. The men who matter, he says, will not face him; what he really wants is to pound Sadeas into the stones and take back his father's lost Blade. With her freehand on his arm she risks the second thing she came to say: Jasnah believed the parshmen were the Voidbringers and a Desolation was coming. Adolin flinches; ordering the warcamps to give up their parshmen would crack the kingdom open in a heartbeat, and she should not say it to anyone else. He offers instead to push Aunt Navani — who has so far refused to acknowledge Shallan exists, mourning Jasnah — into giving her an audience at next week's feast.

Outside, the terrace stirs. The horizon has bled to black. Parshmen pull tables aside, grinding iron over stone, to clear a path to the safe room cut into the hill. Shallan grips the marble balustrade as the prestorm wind comes up the slope and the landscape transforms — vines withdraw, rockbuds close, grass folds into stone, the warcamps' heaped refuse waits to be blown clean across an empty Plains. The stormwall rolls toward them sheet-fast and tall enough to swallow plateaux one by one; light flashes inside it and she catches the silhouette of something alive that no artist has ever drawn. Pattern hums against her shoulder. Adolin has to peel her hand from the rail and hurry her across the empty patio just in time for the parshmen to bar the doors. She counts six seconds between the bar dropping and the storm hitting — they could have stayed out longer; Adolin regards her with frank bewilderment and admits he has no idea what to make of her.

In the women's sitting room — lit by gemstones loose in goblets rather than spheres, an expensive show — backs turn to her at once and lips press flat. Courting the kingdom's most eligible bachelor as a foreigner buys no friends. Shallan does not care; she rewards herself with sweets and begins refining her plan to slip into Amaram's house.