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A year and a half before the main narrative, Shallan sits in her room at the Davar manor reading a book of Jasnah Kholin's essays. The author argues that the question "what is a woman's place" carries its own bias — there is no single role to be set out for half a population; there is a role for each woman, and her strength lies in the power to choose it. Shallan reads it with a kind of wonder: the difficulty Jasnah frames — to be scholar or mother — sounds like a luxury beside a life of fear in a house that seethes with rage and ruin. Two hours earlier Father ordered an assassin to find and kill Helaran; she had overheard it. A pair of guards she does not know — the household's men have been replaced and replaced — now stands at the upstairs hall to keep Malise from running. From down the corridor she can hear her stepmother weeping, which at least means Malise is alive. She wants to hide under a pillow. Instead she imagines what a woman like Jasnah would do, opens the door, and walks past the guards on the strength of her rank alone, hands clenched white.

Downstairs, Father sits alone at the high table in the feast hall with both firepits roaring against the chill. He looks up at her with his own eyes for once, no darkness behind them — a rare night. She slips into the kitchen, mixes his favourite deep violet wine spiced with cinnamon and warmed, and sets it before him. He complains that no one in the house will listen — Wikim stares at the wall, Jushu is worthless, Balat fights him on every step, now Malise too. He hates having to fight his own house. Shallan promises to speak with them; he nods, drinks, and mentions almost in passing that Balat is still out in the garden over those cursed axehound corpses — Father is glad the litter is dead because it was full of runts. Balat did not need them.

In the lantern-lit garden, vines rise like grasping fingers in the dark. Shallan's feet crunch on something underfoot — claws torn one by one from cremlings, tossed aside — as she finds Balat on a bench. She tells him plainly that Father can no longer control himself, that he has ordered a man to find and kill Helaran, and that Balat must leave while he still can and take Malise with him. He shoots upright in fury, then crumples back to the bench with his head in his hands and calls himself a coward. After a moment he admits Helaran left him the name of a contact in Valath who can reach him. Shallan tells him to take Malise and Eylita and to flee during Father's next trip to Vedenar — a few months out — and promises to draft a letter warning Helaran of the assassins and asking him to take all three in. He says she should not have to do this; she is the small one. She tells him taking Malise out will be enough.

She returns to the manor, passes Father still brooding in the firelight, and gathers gauze and cloth from the kitchen. On the stairs she steadies herself, rehearses what she will say, and pushes through into the upstairs sitting room. The guard at the door tries to stop her; she stammers that Father sent her, and only the second guard's trip down to check (and reluctant returning nod) gets her past. She steps inside the Place — the room with the painting she has not entered in years — and has to shield her eyes against the blinding light bleeding out from behind the canvas. How does Father sleep in here? Why does no one else look, no one else care?

Malise is curled in an easy chair with her back to the painting; with her own back to it, Shallan can block the worst of the light. Her stepmother — barely a decade older than her, who oversees Shallan's education only by being the one who keeps having to find new tutors — has a split bleeding lip and a clearly broken left arm. Shallan calls her *Mother* and dabs at the cuts with kitchen cloth, then binds the arm into a splint while the woman whimpers. Malise asks why he does not hate her the way he hates everyone else, then curses the day she married a man whispered to have killed his last wife — she has seen a beast behind his eyes. Shallan tells her she is going to leave: Balat will run and join Helaran, who has powerful friends and is a Shardbearer, and who will protect them. Malise does not believe they will reach him, and twisting away she asks the question that will follow Shallan from the room: when she is gone and Balat is gone, who will he hit then? Perhaps Shallan, finally — the one who actually deserves it. *Maybe*, Shallan whispers, and goes.