POV: shallan
Summary
A year and a half before Shallan sails for Kharbranth, she has become the perfect daughter. She is quiet, especially in Father's presence; she spends her days in her room, by the window, working her way through the same books and the same sketches. He has proven by now, several times over, that when she fails him he beats others in her name. Only with her brothers does she still drop the mask — telling stories by the hearth, mocking his guests, inventing tall tales for Balat and Wikim and Jushu — and she calls herself a coward for not doing more. Outside her room, Father's star is rising; he has stopped being bullied by other lighteyes and started playing them against one another, and a new marble strike has filled his coffers. She watches it and waits for him to laugh again, and he does not.
Lunch at the high table. Father tells Balat to break off contact with the Tavinar woman he has been courting and to consider, instead, the fifty-year-old daughter of the highprince. Balat calls him a murderer across the table; Father rises with his new cold anger, gestures at one of the unfamiliar guards — a man named Rin — to step outside, and tells Balat that his new pod of axehound pups will need to be put down for a sickness. Luesh lays a hand on Father's arm; Father shakes it off and tells Balat outright he would kill him if Balat challenged him — Wikim would serve the house just as well. Balat silences him with a single sentence: Helaran is back. He met him in the city two days ago.
The forbidden name freezes Father in place. He forbids it spoken in his house and leaves the hall. Shallan follows Balat to the kennel, where the guard's work has already been done; the new pups lie in a pool of violet blood. Balat sits over them and tells her what Helaran told him — that this time his return is brief, that he may not be back for a long while, that Balat is to watch over the family in his place. Balat cannot be him. He does not want to be. He wants to take Eylita to Vedenar as a tenth-dahn houseguard if he must, and he asks Shallan to come along as a scribe and earn her own keep. Part of her wants to go. She refuses; if everyone leaves, Father is alone with the thing that has hold of him, and there is no one left to help him.
Climbing back to her room, she passes the cracked door of Father's sitting room. He is with Rin, the new captain. Behind them, the family strongbox shines through the painting covering it, light bursting through the canvas — brilliant to her, invisible to the men. Father tells Rin to ride for Valath, find Helaran, surprise him before he can summon his Blade and bring back his head; Helaran's Blade will be the captain's wage. Shallan stumbles back, already turning over how she might warn her brother, when a voice cuts in from the inner door. Malise — her stepmother, who has never before seemed dangerous — stands in the bedroom doorway and asks Father if he has any compassion left. He answers that Helaran is no longer his son. Malise tells him she has lived with the cloud over the house, has supported him through the story of the first wife, but will not stand for him killing his own son.
Father whispers something to Rin; Shallan flees down the hall to her own room just before Rin slips out and clicks the door shut behind him. She huddles by the bed and presses a pillow over her ears as the shouting starts — a fury in two voices, Malise and Father, thrashing back and forth. When she lifts the pillow it has gone quiet. Her father storms out into the hallway, shouting that nothing in this house would happen if anyone in it would just obey, and thumps away down the stairs.