to get worse. Am I getting worse? I think I feel worse.”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t like this. What we’ve done was wrong. That creature carries my lord’s own Blade. We shouldn’t have let him keep it. He—”
The two passed through the intersection ahead of Jasnah. They were ambassadors from the West, including the Azish man with the white birthmark on his cheek. Or was it a scar? The shorter of the two men—he could have been Alethi—cut off when he noticed Jasnah. He let out a squeak, then hurried on his way.
The Azish man, the one dressed in black and silver, stopped and looked her up and down. He frowned.
“Is the feast over already?” Jasnah asked down the hallway. Her brother had invited these two to the celebration along with every other ranking foreign dignitary in Kholinar.
“Yes,” the man said.
His stare made her uncomfortable. She walked forward anyway. I should check further into these two, she thought. She’d investigated their backgrounds, of course, and found nothing of note. Had they been talking about a Shardblade?
“Come on!” the shorter man said, returning and taking the taller man by the arm.
He allowed himself to be pulled away. Jasnah walked to where the corridors crossed, then watched them go.
Where once drums had sounded, screams suddenly rose.
Oh no . . .
Jasnah turned with alarm, then grabbed her skirt and ran as hard as she could.
A dozen different potential disasters raced through her mind. What else could happen on this broken night, when shadows stood up and her father looked upon her with suspicion? Nerves stretched thin, she reached the steps and started climbing.
It took her far too long. She could hear the screams as she climbed and finally emerged into chaos. Dead bodies in one direction, a demolished wall in the other. How . . .
The destruction led toward her father’s rooms.
The entire palace shook, and a crunch echoed from that direction.
No, no, no!
She passed Shardblade cuts on the stone walls as she ran.
Please.
Corpses with burned eyes. Bodies littered the floor like discarded bones at the dinner table.
Not this.
A broken doorway. Her father’s quarters. Jasnah stopped in the hallway, gasping.
Control yourself, control . . .
She couldn’t. Not now. Frantic, she ran into the quarters, though a Shardbearer would kill her with ease. She wasn’t thinking straight. She should get someone who could help. Dalinar? He’d be drunk. Sadeas, then.
The room looked like it had been hit by a highstorm. Furniture in a shambles, splinters everywhere. The balcony doors were broken outward. Someone lurched toward them, a man in her father’s Shardplate. Tearim, the bodyguard?
No. The helm was broken. It was not Tearim, but Gavilar. Someone on the balcony screamed.
“Father!” Jasnah shouted.
Gavilar hesitated as he stepped out onto the balcony, looking back at her.
The balcony broke beneath him.
Jasnah screamed, dashing through the room to the broken balcony, falling to her knees at the edge. Wind tugged locks of hair loose from her bun as she watched two men fall.
Her father, and the Shin man in white from the feast.
The Shin man glowed with a white light. He fell onto the wall. He hit it, rolling, then came to a stop. He stood up, somehow remaining on the outer palace wall and not falling. It defied reason.
He turned, then stalked toward her father.
Jasnah watched, growing cold, helpless as the assassin stepped down to her father and knelt over him.
Tears fell from her chin, and the wind caught them. What was he doing down there? She couldn’t make it out.
When the assassin walked away, he left behind her father’s corpse. Impaled on a length of wood. He was dead—indeed, his Shardblade had appeared beside him, as they all did when their Bearers died.
“I worked so hard . . .” Jasnah whispered, numb. “Everything I did to protect this family . . .”
How? Liss. Liss had done this!
No. Jasnah wasn’t thinking straight. That Shin man . . . she wouldn’t have admitted to owning him in such a case. She’d sold him.
“We are sorry for your loss.”
Jasnah spun, blinking bleary eyes. Three Parshendi, including Klade, stood in the doorway in their distinctive clothing. Neatly stitched cloth wraps for both men and women, sashes at the waist, loose shirts with no sleeves. Hanging vests, open at the sides, woven in bright colors. They didn’t segregate clothing by gender. She thought they did by caste, however, and—
Stop it, she thought at herself. Stop thinking like a scholar for one storming day!
“We take responsibility for his death,” said the foremost Parshendi. Gangnah