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One year ago. Shallan slips into Balat's room with a short note. He is packing for the run his sister has been organising for him — pick up Eylita under cover of Father's trip to Vedenar, then go to the highprince. Jushu lounges nearby, fingers idle on a leaf. The last storm before the Weeping is sweeping in; servants outside hammer the stormshutters into place. House Davar is wealthier than it has ever been — Father's new quarries are producing — and Father is darker than he has ever been.

Shallan unfolds the letter. No news. Helaran is gone past finding. Balat decides aloud that he is leaving tonight; if he cannot run to Helaran, he will run to the highprince's bastard, who once said he would hear anyone who came to him with grievances against their father. Jushu reminds him that was years ago, that Father is in the highprince's favour now, and that the highprince is dying. Balat will go anyway. He is done with the fear.

The door slams open. Wikim. Eylita has arrived. Father summoned her. She is downstairs in the feast hall, with him. Balat barrels for the door; Shallan follows slowly, because the slow pace resists the inevitability. On the way she steps up the stairs to fetch the pouch Wikim once gave her — the blackbane she kept and that grows more potent with age — and tucks it into her safepouch.

The feast hall is shouting already. Balat in front of the high table, Eylita at his elbow; Father across from them, his half-eaten meal still laid out. Father's voice is the soft kind, which means worst. He knows about the plan. *How?* Balat stumbles back. Shallan steps into the room and rounds along the wall toward the pitcher of wine, and on the way notices what is propping open the kitchen door: Malise's body, fresh-killed by repeated blows to the head. Father had got the plan out of her, then murdered her as the punishment for telling. She thinks of how the protective pretense she'd kept up has been overtaken by the truth she had only pretended to fight.

Father is finishing telling Balat that Helaran is dead — killed on a battlefield in Alethkar, not by their father's own hand, by his own choice of fight. Balat draws. Father draws. Father comes over the table with two-handed blows and beats Balat to his knees in seconds. Shallan steps up with the wine and tells Father that Balat is down and the fight is his. Father takes the cup, drinks it off, drops it, returns his attention to the boy.

Balat strikes from one knee. The sword glances off something metallic under their father's coat and out again. Father shows him the blood on his hand and asks if that was his best after fifteen years of training, and goads him to strike again. Balat starts to cry, sword slipping from his fingers. Father throws his own sword on the table, takes the iron poker from the hearth, and brings it down on his son's thigh. Then again. And again. Shallan tries to take his arm and is knocked across the floor. Eylita huddles over Balat with her face in his hair while Father batters Balat's thigh with the poker, one word per strike, asking why his son can never do anything right — until Balat's leg is a bloody mess and he turns his eye toward Eylita with murder in it.

The poker slips from his fingers. He grabs the table, stares at his own hand, falls to his knees, and slumps. To Shallan the rain on the manor roof sounds like swarming things probing for a way in.

Shallan stands up. She tells Eylita to bind Balat's wounds with his shirt. Wikim and Jushu come tiptoeing into the room. Wikim leans over her and asks if it was Balat's strike to the side that did it. She shakes her head, and tells him about the pouch. *Oh, Stormfather. The blackbane.* In his wine, she says. Malise is dead by the kitchen. He went too far. She lets herself be helped to her feet. *Yes*, she says, when Wikim says she's killed him. She feels exhausted.

Jushu, going through their father's pockets, pulls out a small black bag from inside his coat. From it: chains of silvery metal connecting three large gemstones, one of which is now cracked and dark — the Davar Soulcaster, broken by Balat's sword. *Isn't that blasphemy?* Jushu asks. *Don't those belong only to the king's ardents?* Shallan can't think. Numbness.

Then Wikim shouts. Father's leg has twitched. His fingers spasm. His eyes find Shallan's. The blackbane did not kill him; it has only paralysed him, and the paralysis is wearing off.

Shallan kneels beside him. The job must be finished. Her brothers stumble back; Balat is barely conscious. She unhooks the necklace her father has always liked to see her wear, loops it around his throat, hooks the loop around the handle of a fallen fork, and twists. She thanks him for what he did for her. She sings him the lullaby he sang her as a child, soft over the dying-but-still-conscious body, and watches his face mottle and his eyes accuse her and his body strain to move while she pulls the chain tighter. She finishes the song. He stops moving.