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Shallan is on a tenement rooftop in Sebarial's warcamp before dawn, dressed as Veil, inside an illusion that disguises the storage shed as a brick wall. Below her sits a single old, fronded, stone-barked tree she does not recognize; in its trunk, by Mraize's note, are her next instructions. Five hours of stillness produce nothing — no one approaches the tree, none of the leaf-fronds twitch. She passes the time on the spanreed with Adolin, who is bored, courting her with an ardent scribe instead of one of his father's women, and pleased he has wrangled her a place on a coming scouting expedition to a chrysalis — a harvested one, but real. She does not tell him she is on a rooftop.

The sun has long since risen and she has been outwaited. Mraize has placed someone where she would be if she were Mraize: a hidden eye on the tree. She sends Pattern down through the windows and he finds the watcher one floor below — a small masked woman. The right move, she decides, is the same move the Ghostbloods keep asking her to make: do something Mraize will not have predicted.

She binds an animated Veil decoy to Pattern — the figure glides rather than walks, blinks on her sketch's prescribed cadence — and sends it down the stairs and out toward the tree. Then she ducks one level down to a stairwell alcove. A door opens; the masked woman steps quietly out. Shallan greets her from the dark. The watcher freezes, hand on knife, looks back at the door she has left, and accepts she has been caught. She gives her name only after some pressing: Iyatil. The job in the tree is to be done at once, not followed home. The mark is a new arrival in Dalinar's camp — a man whose existence Mraize thinks is connected to whatever Helaran knew and to whatever Amaram is looking for on the Plains. Shallan offers her hand. Iyatil takes it, keeping the dagger in the other.

In an oversized hired palanquin, Shallan reads Mraize's briefing. The mark is a madman delivered to the camp by one Bordin — by the Ghostbloods' reckoning no simple messenger but a footman Dalinar had stationed in Kholinar to keep an eye on the queen — and locked away in a back cell of Dalinar's warcamp temple complex, ardent access only. Iyatil correctly observes that Mraize is not her master; he is her student. She will not say in what. She speaks of her mask the way one speaks of a virtue: the unmasked walk around with their selves on display; the masked may adapt. She asks whether Shallan is the hunter or the quarry. Shallan says neither. Iyatil tells her everyone is one or the other.

At the gate the porters slow. Shallan leans her own face out of the curtains, the guards recognize the prince's betrothed, and the palanquin is waved through; under cover of Pattern's diversionary yelp at the opposite window she breathes Veil back on before Iyatil can turn her head. Iyatil guesses she bribed the gate supervisor. Shallan lets her think it.

Outside the temple complex she calls the lead ardents over and explains, with apparent reluctance, that her sister has fixed a mask to her face and that she fears Voidbringer touch. They look in on Iyatil — who, with one barely audible sigh, gives them their money's worth: rocking, muttering she will have to kill them if they remove the mask, humming. The ardents take her into a consult room. While Iyatil keeps them transfixed, Shallan sketches a portly ardent of about her own height, slips out, and breathes the disguise on in the empty corridor, tucking her red hair into her coat. Pattern points her down a second hallway — past a long-term case rubbing excrement on the walls in patterns he is briefly distracted by — to a thick locked door. He picks it.

The cell is nearly dark, lit only by a slit of a window. A dark-skinned, hulking man sits on the bed in silhouette, head down, whispering. The voice is unaccented Alethi, although his colouring is Makabaki. He recites the same thing over and over — the Return is at hand, much has been forgotten, men must train and prepare. Shallan kneels and copies it word for word. When she asks his name he answers, once: Talenel'Elin, the one men call Stonesinew. Then he is back to the recitation. She files it as a delusion — many madmen take other men's names — and notes that Dalinar trying to refound the Knights Radiant would be the sort of man to keep a Herald-claiming patient under lock.

She turns to weave the ardent back on and the madman lunges. He smashes her against the wall, breathing ragged, his pupils searching her face. The Blade drops half-summoned into her hand. He mutters about Ishar founding the Knights several Desolations ago, that it has not been mere talk for thousands of years, that something has slipped past him — then stumbles back, walks to the bed, curls up, and resumes the litany. She dismisses the Blade and edges to the door. Footsteps in the hall. Several men are coming — to this door. The one in front is Highlord Amaram.