“I am supposed to know this?” Pattern asked. “You are the expert on feeding.”
Shallan gathered all of her spheres—several were now dun—and set them on the seat across from her, out of reach. That wasn’t far enough, for as her Stormlight ran out, she breathed in using instincts she hadn’t realized she had. Light streamed from across the carriage and into her.
“I’m quite good at that,” Shallan said sourly, “considering how short a time I’ve been doing it.”
“Short time?” Pattern said. “But we first . . .”
She stopped listening until he was done.
“I really need to find another copy of Words of Radiance,” Shallan said, starting another sketch. “Maybe it talks about how to dismiss the illusions.”
She continued to work on her next sketch, a picture of Sebarial. She’d taken a Memory of him while dining the night before, just after returning from a session scouting Amaram’s compound. She wanted to get the details of this sketch right for her collection, so it took some time. Fortunately, the level roadway meant no big bumps. It wasn’t ideal, but she seemed to have less and less time these days, with her research, her work for Sebarial, infiltrating the Ghostbloods, and meetings with Adolin Kholin. She’d had so much more time when she was younger. She couldn’t help thinking she’d wasted much of it.
She let the work consume her. The familiar sound of pencil on paper, the focus of creation. Beauty was out there, all around. To create art was not to capture it, but to participate in it.
When she finished, a glance out the window showed them approaching the Pinnacle. She held up the sketch, studying it, then nodded to herself. Satisfactory.
Next she tried using Stormlight to create an image. She breathed out a lot of it, and it formed immediately, snapping into an image of Sebarial sitting across from her in the carriage. He held the same position as he did in her sketch, hands out to slice food that was not included in her image.
Shallan smiled. The detail was perfect. Folds in skin, individual hairs. She hadn’t drawn those—no sketch could capture all the hairs on a head, all the pores in skin. Her image had these things, so it didn’t create exactly what she drew, but the drawing was a focus. A model that the image built from.
“Mmm,” Pattern said, sounding satisfied. “One of your most truthful lies. Wonderful.”
“He doesn’t move,” Shallan said. “Nobody would mistake this for something living, never mind the unnatural pose. The eyes are lifeless; the chest doesn’t rise and fall with breath. The muscles don’t shift. It’s detailed—but like a statue can be detailed yet still dead.”
“A statue of light.”
“I didn’t say it isn’t impressive,” Shallan said. “But the images will be much harder to use unless I can give them life.” How strange that she should feel that her sketches were alive, but this thing—which was so much more realistic—was dead.
She reached out to wave her hand through the image. If she touched it slowly, the disturbance was minor. Waving her hand disturbed it like smoke. She noticed something else. While her hand was in the image . . .
Yes. She sucked in a breath and the image dissolved to glowing smoke, drawn into her skin. She could reclaim Stormlight from the illusion. One question answered, she thought, settling back and making notes about the experience in the back of the notebook.
She began packing up her satchel as the carriage arrived at the Outer Market, where Adolin would be waiting for her. They’d gone on their promised walk the day before, and she felt things were going well. But she also knew she needed to impress him. Her efforts with Highlady Navani had not been fruitful so far, and she really did need an alliance with the Kholin house.
That made her consider. Her hair had dried, but she tended to keep it long and straight down her back, with only its natural curl to give it body. The Alethi women favored intricate braids instead.
Her skin was pale and dusted lightly with freckles, and her body was nowhere near curvaceous enough to inspire envy. She could change all of this with an illusion. An augmentation. Since Adolin had seen her without, she couldn’t change anything dramatic—but she could enhance herself. It would be like wearing makeup.
She hesitated. If Adolin came to agree to the marriage, would it be because of her, or the lies?
Foolish girl, Shallan thought. You were willing to change your appearance to get Vathah to follow you and to gain a place with Sebarial, but not now?
But capturing Adolin’s attention with illusions would lead her down a difficult path. She couldn’t wear an illusion always, could she? In married life? Better to see what she could do without one, she thought as she climbed out of the carriage. She’d have to rely, instead, upon her feminine wiles.
She wished she knew if she had any.
THREE YEARS AGO
“These are really good, Shallan,” Balat said, leafing through pages of her sketches. The two of them sat in the gardens, accompanied by Wikim, who sat on the ground tossing a cloth-wrapped ball for his axehound Sakisa to catch.
“My anatomy is off,” Shallan said with a blush. “I can’t get the proportions right.” She needed models to pose for her so she could work on that.
“You’re better than Mother ever was,” Balat said, flipping to another page, where she had sketched Balat on the sparring grounds with his swordsmanship tutor. He tipped it toward Wikim, who raised an eyebrow.
Her middle brother was looking better and better these last four months. Less scrawny, more solid. He almost constantly had mathematical problems with him. Father had once railed at him for that, claiming it was feminine and unseemly—but, in a rare show of dissension, Father’s ardents had approached him and told him to calm himself, and that the Almighty approved of Wikim’s interest. They hoped Wikim might find his way into their ranks.
“I heard that you got another letter from Eylita,” Shallan said, trying to distract Balat from the sketchbook. She couldn’t keep herself from blushing as he turned page after page. Those weren’t meant for others to look at. They weren’t any good.
“Yeah,” he said, grinning.
“You going to have Shallan read it to you?” Wikim asked, throwing the ball.
Balat coughed. “I had Malise do it. Shallan was busy.”
“You’re embarrassed!” Wikim said, pointing. “What is in those letters?”
“Things my fourteen-year-old sister doesn’t need to know about!” Balat said.
“That racy, eh?” Wikim asked. “I wouldn’t have figured that for the Tavinar girl. She seems too proper.”
“No!” Balat blushed further. “They aren’t racy; they are merely private.”
“Private like your—”
“Wikim,” Shallan cut in.
He looked up, and then noticed that angerspren were pooling underneath Balat’s feet. “Storms, Balat. You are getting so touchy about that girl.”
“Love makes us all fools,” Shallan said, distracting the two.
“Love?” Balat asked, glancing at her. “Shallan, you’re barely old enough to pin up your safehand. What do you know about love?”
She blushed. “I . . . never mind.”
“Oh, look at that,” Wikim said. “She’s thought up something clever. You’re going to have to say it now, Shallan.”
“No use keeping something like that inside,” Balat agreed.
“Ministara says I speak my mind too much. That it’s not a feminine attribute.”
Wikim laughed. “That hasn’t seemed to stop any women I’ve known.”
“Yeah, Shallan,” Balat said. “If you can’t say the things you think of to us, then who can you say them to?”
“Trees,” she said, “rocks, shrubs. Basically anything that can’t get me in trouble with my tutors.”
“You don’t have to worry about Balat, then,” Wikim said. “He couldn’t manage something clever even in repetition.”
“Hey!” Balat said. Though, unfortunately, it wasn’t far from the truth.
“Love,” Shallan said, though partially just to distract them, “is like a pile of chull dung.”
“Smelly?” Balat asked.
“No,” Shallan said, “for even as we try to avoid both, we end up stepping in them anyway.”
“Deep words for a girl who hit her teens precisely fifteen months ago,” Wikim said with a chuckle.
“Love is like the sun,” Balat said, sighing.
“Blinding?” Shallan asked. “White, warm, powerful—but also capable of burning you?”
“Perhaps,” Balat said, nodding.
“Love is like a Herdazian surgeon,” Wikim said, looking at her.
“And how is that?” Shallan asked.
“You tell me,” Wikim said. “I’m seeing what you can make of it.”
“Um . . . Both leave you uncomfortable?” Shallan said. “No. Ooh! The only reason you’d want one was if you’d taken a sharp blow to the head!”
“Ha! Love is like spoiled food.”
“Necessary for life on one hand,” Shallan said, “but also expressly nauseating.”
“Father’s snoring.”
She shuddered. “You have to experience it to believe just how distracting it can be.”
Wikim chuckled. Storms, but it was good to see him doing that.
“Stop it, you two,” Balat said. “That kind of talk is disrespectful. Love . . . love is like a classical melody.”
Shallan grinned. “If you end your performance too quickly, your audience is disappointed?”
“Shallan!” Balat said.
Wikim, however, was rolling on the ground. After a moment, Balat shook his head, and gave an agreeable chuckle. For her own part, Shallan was blushing. Did I really just say that? That last one had actually been somewhat witty, far better than the others. It had also been improper.
She got a guilty thrill from it. Balat looked embarrassed, and he blushed at the double meaning, collecting shamespren. Sturdy Balat. He wanted so much to lead them. So far as she knew, he’d given up his habit of killing cremlings for fun. Being in love strengthened him, changed him.
The sound of wheels on stone announced a carriage arriving at the house. No hoofbeats—father owned horses, but few other people in the area did. Their carriages were pulled by chulls or parshmen.
Balat rose to go see who had come, and Sakisa followed after, trumping in excitement. Shallan picked up her sketchpad. Father had recently forbidden her from drawing the manor’s parshmen or darkeyes—he found it unseemly. That made it hard for her to find practice figures.
“Shallan?”
She started, realizing that Wikim hadn’t followed Balat. “Yes.”
“I was wrong,” Wikim said, handing her something. A small pouch. “About what you’re doing. I see through it. And . . . and still it’s working. Damnation, but it’s working. Thank you.”
She moved to open the pouch he’d given her.
“Don’t,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Blackbane,” Wikim said. “A plant, the leaves at least. If you eat them, they paralyze you. Your breathing stops too.”
Disturbed, she pulled the top tight. She didn’t even want to know how Wikim could recognize a deadly plant like this.
“I’ve carried those for the better part of a year,” Wikim said softly. “The longer you have them, the more potent the leaves are supposed to become. I don’t feel like I need them any longer. You can burn them, or whatever. I just thought you should have them.”
She smiled, though she felt unsettled. Wikim had been carrying this poison around? He felt he needed to give it to her?
He jogged after Balat, and Shallan stuffed the pouch in her satchel. She’d find a way to destroy it later. She picked up her pencils and went back to drawing.
Shouting from inside the manor distracted her a short time later. She looked up, uncertain even how much time had passed. She rose, satchel clutched to her chest, and crossed the yard. Vines shook and withdrew before her, though as her pace sped up, she stepped on more and more of them, feeling them writhe beneath her feet and try to yank back. Cultivated vines had poor instincts.
She reached the house to more shouting.
“Father!” Asha Jushu’s voice. “Father, please!”
Shallan pushed open the slatted wood doors, silk dress rustling against the floor as she stepped in and found three men in old-style clothing—skirtlike ulatu to their knees, bright loose shirts, flimsy coats that draped to the ground—standing before Father.
Jushu knelt on the floor, hands bound behind his back. Over the years, Jushu had grown plump from his periods of excess.
“Bah,” Father said. “I will not suffer this extortion.”
“His credit is your credit, Brightlord,” one of the men said in a calm, smooth voice. He was darkeyed, though he didn’t sound it. “He promised us you would pay his debts.”
“He lied,” Father said, Ekel and Jix—house guards—at his sides, hands on weapons.
“Father,” Jushu whispered through his tears. “They’ll take me—”
“You were supposed to be riding our outer holdings!” Father bellowed. “You were supposed to be checking on our lands, not dining with thieves and gambling away our wealth and our good name!”
Jushu hung his head, sagging in his bonds.
“He’s yours,” Father said, turning and storming from the chamber.
Shallan gasped as one of the men sighed, then gestured toward Jushu. The other two grabbed him. They didn’t seem pleased to be leaving without payment. Jushu trembled as they towed him away, past Balat and Wikim, who watched nearby. Outside, Jushu cried for mercy and begged the men to let him speak to Father again.
“Balat,” Shallan said, walking to him, taking his arm. “Do something!”
“We all knew where the gambling would take him,” Balat said. “We told him, Shallan. He wouldn’t listen.”
“He’s still our brother!”
“What do you expect me to do? Where would I get spheres enough to pay his debt?”
Jushu’s weeping grew softer as the men left the manor.
Shallan turned and dashed after her father, passing Jix scratching his head. Father had gone into his study two rooms over; she hesitated in the doorway, looking in at her father slumped in his chair beside the hearth. She stepped in, passing the desk where his ardents—and sometimes his wife—tallied his ledgers and read him reports.
Nobody stood there now, but the ledgers were open, displaying a brutal truth. She raised a hand to her mouth, noticing several letters of debt. She’d helped with minor accounts, but never seen so much of the full picture, and was stunned by what she saw. How could the family owe that much money?
“I’m not going to change my mind, Shallan,” Father said. “Leave. Jushu prepared this pyre himself.”
“But—”
“Leave me!” Father roared, standing.
Shallan cringed back, eyes widening, heart nearly stopping. Fearspren wriggled up around her. He never yelled at her. Never.
Father took a deep breath, then turned to the room’s window. His back to her, he continued, “I can’t afford the spheres.”
“Why?” Shallan asked. “Father, is this because of the deal with Brightlord Revilar?” She looked at the ledgers. “No, it’s bigger than that.”
“I will finally make something of myself,” Father said, “and of this house. I will stop them from whispering about us; I will end the questioning. House Davar will become a force in this princedom.”
“By bribing favor from supposed allies?” Shallan asked. “Using money we don’t have?”
He looked at her, face shadowed but eyes reflecting light, like twin embers in the dark of his skull. In that moment, Shallan felt a terrifying hatred from her father. He strode over, grabbing her by the arms. Her satchel dropped to the floor.
“I’ve done this for you,” he growled, holding her arms in a tight, painful grip. “And you will obey. I’ve gone wrong, somewhere, in letting you learn to question me.”
She whimpered at the pain.
“There will be changes in this house,” Father said. “No more weakness. I’ve found a way . . .”
“Please, stop.”
He looked down at her and seemed to see the tears in her eyes for the first time.
“Father . . .” she whispered.
He looked upward. Toward his rooms. She knew he was looking toward Mother’s soul. He dropped her then, causing her to tumble to the floor, red hair covering her face.
“You are confined to your rooms,” he snapped. “Go, and do not leave until I give you permission.”
Shallan scrambled to her feet, snatching her satchel, then left the room. In the hallway, she pressed her back against the wall, panting raggedly, tears dripping from her chin. Things had been going better . . . her father had been better . . .
She squeezed her eyes shut. Emotion stormed inside of her, twisting about. She couldn’t control it.
Jushu.
Father actually looked like he wanted to hurt me, Shallan thought, shivering. He’s changed so much. She started to sink down toward the floor, arms wrapped around herself.
Jushu.
Keep cutting at those thorns, strong one . . . Make a path for the light . . .
Shallan forced herself to her feet. She ran, still crying, back into the feast hall. Balat and Wikim had taken seats, Minara quietly serving them drinks. The guards had left, perhaps to their post at the manor grounds.
When Balat saw Shallan, he stood, eyes widening. He rushed to her, knocking over his cup in his haste, spilling wine to the floor.
“Did he hurt you?” Balat asked. “Damnation! I’ll kill him! I’ll go to the highprince and—”
“He didn’t hurt me,” Shallan said. “Please. Balat, your knife. The one Father gave you.”
He looked to his belt. “What of it?”
“It’s worth good money. I’m going to try to trade it for Jushu.”
Balat lowered his hand protectively to the knife. “Jushu built his pyre himself, Shallan.”
“That’s exactly what Father said to me,” Shallan replied, wiping her eyes, then meeting those of her brother.
“I . . .” Balat looked over his shoulder in the direction Jushu had been taken. He sighed, then unhooked the sheath from his belt and handed it to her. “It won’t be enough. They say he owes almost a hundred emerald broams.”
“I have my necklace too,” Shallan said.
Wikim, silently drinking his wine, reached to his belt and took off his knife. He set it at the edge of the table. Shallan scooped it up as she passed, then ran from the room. Could she catch the men in time?
Outside, she spotted the carriage only a short way down the road. She hurried as best she could on slippered feet down the cobbled drive and out the gates onto the road. She wasn’t fast, but neither were chulls. As she drew closer, she saw that Jushu had been tied to walk behind the carriage. He didn’t look up as Shallan passed him.
The carriage stopped, and Jushu dropped to the ground and curled up. The darkeyed man with the haughty air pushed open his door to look at Shallan. “He sent the child?”
“I came on my own,” she said, holding up the daggers. “Please, they are very fine work.”
The man raised an eyebrow, then gestured for one of his companions to step down and fetch them. Shallan unhooked her necklace and dropped it into the man’s hands with the two knives. The man took out one of the knives, inspecting it as Shallan waited, apprehensive, shifting from foot to foot.
“You’ve been weeping,” said the man in the carriage. “You care for him that much?”
“He is my brother.”