The Way of Kings - By Brandon Sanderson Page 0,315

on her nightstand melted, the glass becoming red liquid, dropping the three spheres inside to the nightstand’s flooded top. The red liquid poured over the sides of the nightstand, splashing to the floor. Shallan pulled back, horrified.

The goblet had been changed into blood.

Her shocked motion thumped the nightstand, shaking it. An empty glass water pitcher had been sitting beside the goblet. Her motion knocked it over, toppling it to the ground. It shattered on the stone floor, splashing the blood.

That was a Soulcasting! she thought. She’d changed the goblet into blood, which was one of the Ten Essences. She raised her hand to her head, staring at the red liquid expanding in a pool on her floor. There seemed to be quite a lot of it.

She was so bewildered. The voice, the creatures, the sea of glass beads and the dark, cold sky. It had all come upon her so quickly.

I Soulcast, she realized again. I did it!

Did it have something to do with the creatures? But she’d begun seeing them in her drawings before she’d ever stolen the Soulcaster. How…what…? She looked down at her safehand and the Soulcaster hidden in the pouch inside her sleeve.

I didn’t put it on, she thought. Yet I used it anyway.

“Shallan?”

It was Jasnah’s voice. Just outside Shallan’s room. The princess must have followed her. Shallan felt a spike of terror as she saw a line of blood leaking toward the doorway. It was almost there, and would pass underneath in a heartbeat.

Why did it have to be blood? Nauseated, she leaped to her feet, slippers soaking up the red liquid.

“Shallan?” Jasnah said, voice closer. “What was that sound?”

Shallan looked frantically at the blood, then at the sketchpad, filled with pictures of the strange creatures. What if they did have something to do with the Soulcasting? Jasnah would recognize them. There was a shadow under the door.

She panicked, tucking the sketchpad away in her trunk. But the blood, it would condemn her. There was enough that only a life-threatening wound could have created it. Jasnah would see. She’d know. Blood where there should be none? One of the Ten Essences?

Jasnah was going to know what Shallan had done!

A thought struck Shallan. It wasn’t a brilliant thought, but it was a way out, and it was the only thing that occurred to her. She went to her knees and grabbed a shard of the broken glass pitcher in her safehand, through the fabric of her sleeve. She took a breath and pulled up her right sleeve, then used the glass to cut a shallow gash in her skin. In the panic of the moment, it barely even hurt. Blood welled out.

As the doorknob turned and the door opened, Shallan dropped the glass shard and lay on her side. She closed her eyes, feigning unconsciousness. The door swung open.

Jasnah gasped, immediately calling for help. She rushed to Shallan’s side, grabbing her arm and putting pressure on the wound. Shallan mumbled, as if she were barely conscious, gripping her safepouch—and the Soulcaster inside—with her safehand. They wouldn’t open it, would they? She pulled her arm closer to her chest, cowering silently as more footsteps and calls sounded, servants and parshmen running into the room, Jasnah shouting for more help.

This, Shallan thought, will not end well.

“Though I was due for dinner in Veden City that night, I insisted upon visiting Kholinar to speak with Tivbet. The tariffs through Urithiru were growing quite unreasonable. By then, the so-called Radiants had already begun to show their true nature.”

—Following the firing of the original Palanaeum, only one page of Terxim’s autobiography remained, and this is the only line of any use to me.

Kaladin dreamed he was the storm.

He raged forward, the stormwall behind him his trailing cape, soaring above a heaving, black expanse. The ocean. His passing churned up a tempest, slamming waves into one another, lifting white caps to be caught in his wind.

He approached a dark continent and soared upward. Higher. Higher. He left the sea behind. The vastness of the continent spread out before him, seemingly endless, an ocean of rock. So large, he thought, awed. He hadn’t understood. How could he have?

He roared past the Shattered Plains. They looked as if something very large had hit them at the center, sending rippling breaks outward. They too were larger than he’d expected; no wonder nobody had been able to find their way through the chasms.

There was a large plateau at the center, but with the darkness and the