(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Past second moon, Shallan should be asleep. Instead she is sprawled across a too-soft bed in Sebarial's warcamp, buried in stacks of maps and notes, with Pattern on the wall above her headboard and a half-finished argument running in her head. Pattern inquires after her sleep cycle with the bafflement of a thing that has never slept. He volunteers a soldier's joke about a prostitute he picked up off Vathah's men, and then dutifully tries to explain why it is funny. She tells him nothing kills a joke faster than explaining it.

The point of the scholarship is older than the bed. She holds an antique map of the east beside a modern one she copied from Amaram's study wall — bastard, she notes again to herself — and lays a finger on the old name of the country: Natanatan, one of the Epoch Kingdoms said to have been organized by the Heralds themselves. The mainstream scholars place its capital, Stormseat, up in the highlands somewhere. Jasnah disagreed; Shallan agrees with Jasnah. Setting the modern map beside the older one, she stabs at a point and tells Pattern that Stormseat sat on the Plains themselves — that the Parshendi's impossibly fine weapons came from the ruined city beneath their feet, that the warcamp craters were once domes, that the Plains have not always been shattered. Something shattered Stormseat into fragments — the world has been too long since to remember what.

Amaram's own notes, copied from his wall, lead her to the same answer Jasnah reached: each of the ten Epoch capitals held an Oathgate to Urithiru and a throne in its conference chamber, which is why no two maps placed the holy city in the same spot — you did not walk there, you stepped through. Whatever else Amaram is hunting on the Plains, he is hunting the path to Urithiru. Unlike her, he is also trying to find the Parshendi to ask how to bring the Voidbringers back. She does not know why.

Pattern interrupts the spiral. He tells her quietly that he did not come to teach her tricks of light; she came to him to do something greater, and she has forgotten too much of what she once knew. The boxes inside her head rattle, the ones that all lead the same way: a carpet bloodied, and a carpet not. An image rises beside her without her drawing it first — herself, the girl she should be: curled on the bed, past tears, flinching at every sound, untouched by any laughter. That, she knows, is the real Shallan. The one she walks around as is a lie she fabricated to survive. She banishes the image and refuses to look at it.

Instead she draws Veil — the darkeyed, slightly older, sharper-chinned con woman she has been wearing into Sadeas's and Mraize's warcamp — and breathes out a Lightweaving beside the bed. The image holds. Sound, however, will not come; nothing she tries draws even a whisper from Veil's mouth. Frustrated, she walks for a drink and notices the illusion blurring with distance — and notices, separately, that she is holding a great deal of Stormlight and not glowing. The illusion is eating it.

Then she watches Pattern cross the bedcover and sees Veil's elbow sharpen as he draws near. The bond, the illusion, Pattern — three sides of one connection. She presses her hand down on him, pushes Stormlight into him until he steams with it like a hotplate fabrial, attaches the image to him as she would normally attach one to herself, and tells him to walk. He moves; Veil moves with him. The figure does not walk so much as glide — light caught on the surface of a turning spoon — but it goes where he goes, and his glow vanishes under it. She raises a cup of wine to herself in the next room and gets out her sketchpad. There is more to teach the figure than gliding.