“Brightness?”

“The key,” she said.

“Oh.” He pulled it out of a pocket, regarding it for a moment—too long a moment—before handing it to her.

“Thank you,” she replied. “You may send Bluth with my meal when it is ready, but I shall require a bucket of clean water immediately. You have been most accommodating. I will not forget your service.”

“Er . . . Thank you.” It almost sounded like a question, and as he walked away, he seemed confused. Good.

She waited for Bluth to bring the water, then crawled—to stay off her feet—through the enclosed wagon. It stank of dirt and sweat, and she grew nauseated thinking of the slaves who had been held here. She would ask Bluth to have the parshmen scrub it later.

She stopped before Jasnah’s trunk, then knelt and gingerly raised the lid. Light spilled out from the infused spheres inside. Pattern waited there as well—she had instructed him not to be seen—his shape raising the cover of a book.

Shallan had survived, so far. She certainly wasn’t safe, but at least she wasn’t going to freeze or starve immediately. That meant she finally had to face greater questions and problems. She rested her hand on the books, ignoring her throbbing feet for the moment. “These have to reach the Shattered Plains.”

Pattern vibrated with a confused sound—a questioning pitch that implied curiosity.

“Someone needs to continue Jasnah’s work,” Shallan said. “Urithiru must be found, and the Alethi must be convinced that the return of the Voidbringers is imminent.” She shivered, thinking of the marbled parshmen working just one wagon over.

“You . . . mmm . . . continue?” Pattern asked.

“Yes.” She’d made that decision the moment she’d insisted that Tvlakv head for the Shattered Plains. “That night before the sinking, when I saw Jasnah with her guard down . . . I know what I must do.”

Pattern hummed, again sounding confused.

“It’s hard to explain,” Shallan said. “It’s a human thing.”

“Excellent,” Pattern said, eager.

She raised an eyebrow toward him. He’d quickly come a long way from spending hours spinning in the center of a room or climbing up and down walls.

Shallan took out some spheres for better light, then removed one of the cloths Jasnah had wrapped around her books. It was immaculately clean. Shallan dipped the cloth into the bucket of water and began to wash her feet.

“Before I saw Jasnah’s expression that night,” she explained, “before I talked to her through her fatigue and got a sense of just how worried she was, I had fallen into a trap. The trap of a scholar. Despite my initial horror at what Jasnah had described about the parshmen, I had come to see it all as an intellectual puzzle. Jasnah was so outwardly dispassionate that I assumed she did the same.”

Shallan winced as she dug a bit of rock from a crack in her foot. More painspren wiggled out of the floor of the wagon. She wouldn’t be walking great distances anytime soon, but at least she didn’t see any rotspren yet. She had better find some antiseptic.

“Our danger isn’t just theoretical, Pattern. It is real and it is terrible.”

“Yes,” Pattern said, voice sounding grave.

She looked up from her feet. He had moved up onto the inside of the chest’s lid, lit by the varied light of the differently colored spheres. “You know something about the danger? The parshmen, the Voidbringers?” Perhaps she was reading too much into his tones. He wasn’t human, and often spoke with strange inflections.

“My return . . .” Pattern said. “Because of this.”

“What? Why haven’t you said something!”

“Say . . . speaking . . . Thinking . . . All hard. Getting better.”

“You came to me because of the Voidbringers,” Shallan said, moving closer to the trunk, bloodied rag forgotten in her hand.

“Yes. Patterns . . . we . . . us . . . Worry. One was sent. Me.”

“Why to me?”

“Because of lies.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

He buzzed in dissatisfaction. “You. Your family.”

“You watched me with my family? That long ago?”

“Shallan. Remember . . .”

Again those memories. This time, not a garden seat, but a sterile white room. Her father’s lullaby. Blood on the floor.

No.

She turned away and began cleaning her feet again.

“I know . . . little of humans,” Pattern said. “They break. Their minds break. You did not break. Only cracked.”

She continued her washing.

“It is the lies that save you,” Pattern said. “The lies that drew me.”

She dipped her rag in the bucket. “Do you have a name? I’ve called you Pattern, but it’s more of a description.”

“Name is numbers,” Pattern said. “Many numbers. Hard to say. Pattern . . . Pattern is fine.”

“As long as you don’t start calling me Erratic as a contrast,” Shallan said.

“Mmmmmm . . .”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“I am thinking,” Pattern said. “Considering the lie.”

“The joke?”

“Yes.”

“Please don’t think too hard,” Shallan said. “It wasn’t a particularly good joke. If you want to ponder a real one, consider that stopping the return of the Voidbringers might depend on me, of all people.”

“Mmmmm . . .”

She finished with her feet as best she could, then wrapped them with several other cloths from the trunk. She had no slippers or shoes. Perhaps she could buy an extra pair of boots from one of the slavers? The mere thought made her stomach churn, but she didn’t have a choice.

Next, she sorted through the contents of the trunk. This was only one of Jasnah’s trunks, but Shallan recognized it as the one the woman kept in her own cabin—the one the assassins had taken. It contained Jasnah’s notes: books and books full of them. The trunk contained few primary sources, but that didn’t matter, as Jasnah had meticulously transcribed all relevant passages.

As Shallan set aside the last book, she noticed something on the bottom of the trunk. A loose piece of paper? She picked it up, curious—then nearly dropped it in surprise.

It was a picture of Jasnah, drawn by Shallan herself. Shallan had given it to the woman after being accepted as her ward. She’d assumed Jasnah had thrown it away—the woman had little fondness for visual arts, which she considered a frivolity.

Instead, she’d kept it here with her most precious things. No. Shallan didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to face it.

“Mmm . . .” Pattern said. “You cannot keep all lies. Only the most important.”

Shallan reached up and found tears in her eyes. For Jasnah. She’d been avoiding the grief, had stuffed it into a little box and set it away.

As soon as she let that grief come, another piled on top of it. A grief that seemed frivolous in comparison to Jasnah’s death, but one that threatened to tow Shallan down as much, or even more.

“My sketchpads . . .” she whispered. “All gone.”

“Yes,” Pattern said, sounding sorrowful.

“Every drawing I’ve ever kept. My brothers, my father, Mother . . .” All sunk into the depths, along with her sketches of creatures and her musings on their connections, biology, and nature. Gone. Every bit of it gone.

The world didn’t depend upon Shallan’s silly pictures of skyeels. She felt as if everything was broken anyway.

“You will draw more,” Pattern whispered.

“I don’t want to.” Shallan blinked free more tears.

“I will not stop vibrating. The wind will not stop blowing. You will not stop drawing.”

Shallan brushed her fingers across the picture of Jasnah. The woman’s eyes were alight, almost alive again—it was the first picture Shallan had drawn of Jasnah, done on the day they’d met. “The broken Soulcaster was with my things. It’s now on the bottom of the ocean, lost. I won’t be able to repair it and send it to my brothers.”

Pattern buzzed in what sounded like a morose tone to her.

“Who are they?” Shallan asked. “The ones who did this, who killed her and took my art from me. Why would they do such horrible things?”

“I do not know.”

“But you are certain that Jasnah was right?” Shallan said. “The Voidbringers are going to return?”

“Yes. Spren . . . spren of him. They come.”

“These people,” Shallan said, “they killed Jasnah. They were probably of the same group as Kabsal, and . . . and as my father. Why would they kill the person closest to understanding how, and why, the Voidbringers are coming back?”

“I . . .” He faltered.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” Shallan said. “I already know the answer, and it is a very human one. These people seek to control the knowledge so that they can profit from it. Profit from the apocalypse itself. We’re going to see that doesn’t happen.”

She lowered the sketch of Jasnah, setting it between the pages of a book to keep it safe.

Mateform meek, for love to share,

Given to life, it brings us joy.

To find this form, one must care.

True empathy one must employ.

—From the Listener Song of Listing, 5th stanza

“It’s been a while,” Adolin said, kneeling and holding his Shardblade before him, point sunken a few inches into the stone ground. He was alone. Just him and the sword in one of the new preparation rooms, built alongside the dueling arena.

“I remember when I won you,” Adolin whispered, looking at his reflection in the blade. “Nobody took me seriously then, either. The fop with the nice clothing. Tinalar thought to duel me just to embarrass my father. Instead I got his Blade.” If he’d lost, he would have had to give Tinalar his Plate, which he’d inherited from his mother’s side of the family.

Adolin had never named his Shardblade. Some did, some didn’t. He’d never thought it appropriate—not because he didn’t think the Blade deserved a name, but because he figured he didn’t know the right one. This weapon had belonged to one of the Knights Radiant, long ago. That man had named the weapon, undoubtedly. To call it something else seemed presumptuous. Adolin had felt that way even before he’d started thinking of the Radiants in a good light, as his father did.

This Blade would continue after Adolin died. He didn’t own it. He was borrowing it for a time.

Its surface was austerely smooth, long, sinuous like an eel, with ridges at the back like growing crystals. Shaped like a larger version of a standard longsword, it bore some resemblance to the enormous, two-handed broadswords he’d seen Horneaters wield.

“A real duel,” Adolin whispered to the Blade. “For real stakes. Finally. No more tiptoeing around it, no more limiting myself.”