POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan steps out of a hired carriage into a light rain in the Unclaimed Hills, an hour's ride west of the warcamps, dressed in Tyn's old white coat and trousers and the hat she has taken to wearing whenever she becomes Veil. The desolate stormlands have bloomed in the soft weather — rockbuds open, fresh grass, reeds putting up petals to feed the cremlings that will spread their spores — and she walks toward the meeting point in honest pleasure at the rain.
She rounds a hill and finds an open-sided pavilion pitched in a sheltered crack of fallen rock. Four of Mraize's Ghostbloods sit under it; two are the same as her first meeting, two are new. The masked woman is not present. Mraize himself stands at the edge handling a long Parshendi blowgun — he likes, he explains, to know a people through their weapons — and puffs a dart through a foreign cremling to demonstrate. He calls her little knife, asks her to read the people who made the blowgun for him, and seems pleased by her answers about hunting cultures and assassination.
He turns on her without warning: he assumes she has come bearing an excuse for failing the assignment. The watchers he put on Amaram's manor saw no one come or go. Shallan silently produces the proof: a folio of sketches of Amaram's locked room and its walls — maps of the Plains more extensive than the king's, and pages of the stormwarden phonetic script. She has rendered the script as illegible squiggles by design; she does not intend to give them everything. Mraize is openly stunned. He confirms aloud that Tyn never had this skill, and asks how she did it.
She tells him she sketched it from memory after the fact. He hides a flinch, well; she realises after the words leave her that one of Shallan Davar's real skills has now been spoken in Veil's voice, and that the Ghostbloods are watching closely enough to draw the line back if she is not careful. He calls up a golden-haired man named Jin to model, asks her to draw him from a single look, and coos over the result as a fond father. He offers her a place in his organization if she proves reliable. He asks her, with a smile, whether she killed Tyn — and laughs aloud at her blush. He frames it as not encouraged but not forbidden; Tyn was hunter and game both, and Shallan is now welcome to be hunter. He tells her more instructions will follow, then turns away, dismissing her.
She walks back toward her carriage with her shoulders hunched and the others' cold stares on her spine. She tells Pattern to send the coachman on with a perfect imitation of her voice — pretend she has slipped back inside, drive to the warcamps, wait a count of ten and then go — and as soon as the carriage rolls away she breathes out Stormlight and shapes the boulder she had drawn earlier in Mraize's sketch. She curls up inside it. Hoofbeats follow the carriage almost at once; the riders she could not see were waiting.
A short time later Mraize passes within feet of her. He tells a rasping courier to carry her pages to Master Thaidakar himself, says Restares's allies are close on the same trail but a fool not to be feared, and turns the conversation to a being in Tukar he doubts is even human, and certainly not native to Roshar. They pass. More hoofbeats. The rain starts again, fat drops dripping straight through the illusion of the rock. She waits, cold and aching, with her satchel in her lap, until the boulder dissolves around her in pale smoke. She has, without realising it, drained every sphere in her pocket holding the picture. The sky is darkening; hours have passed.
She walks. Pleasure in the rain has gone out of it. A long way down the road she finds a smear of dark on the stone ahead and smells doused fire and approaches the half-burnt carriage of the man she hired this morning. His throat has been cut and he is lying on his back staring up at the dimming sky. The parshmen who were pulling the cart have been killed alongside him and stacked. She sits on the wet ground with her hand to her mouth and tells Pattern she has killed them, and means it. Mraize had not held the knife, but he had given them permission. The Ghostbloods have made it plain in front of her exactly what she has signed up to.