of exposure out here. Or starvation. What would she do when a highstorm came? When was the next one? Tomorrow night? Or was it the night after.
“Come!” Pattern said.
He vibrated in the sand. Grains jumped and shook as he spoke, rising and falling around him. I recognize that . . . Shallan thought, frowning at him. Sand on a plate. Kabsal . . .
“Come!” Pattern repeated, more urgent.
“What?” Shallan said, standing up. Storms, but she was tired. She could barely move. “Did you find someone?”
“Yes!”
That got her attention immediately. She didn’t ask further questions, but instead followed Pattern, who moved excitedly down the coast. Would he know the difference between someone dangerous and someone friendly? For the moment, cold and exhausted, she almost didn’t care.
He stopped beside something halfway submerged in the water and seaweed at the edge of the ocean. Shallan frowned.
A trunk. Not a person, but a large wooden trunk. Shallan’s breath caught in her throat, and she dropped to her knees, working the clasps and pulling open the lid.
Inside, like a glowing treasure, were Jasnah’s books and notes, carefully packed away, protected in their waterproof enclosure.
Jasnah might not have survived, but her life’s work had.
* * *
Shallan knelt down by her improvised firepit. A grouping of rocks, filled with sticks she’d gathered from this little stand of trees. Night was almost upon her.
With it came the shocking cold, as bad as the worst winter back home. Here in the Frostlands, this would be common. Her clothing, which in this humidity hadn’t completely dried despite the hours walking, felt like ice.
She did not know how to build a fire, but perhaps she could make one in another way. She fought through her weariness—storms, but she was exhausted—and took out a glowing sphere, one of many she’d found in Jasnah’s trunk.
“All right,” she whispered. “Let’s do this.” Shadesmar.
“Mmm . . .” Pattern said. She was learning to interpret his humming. This seemed anxious. “Dangerous.”
“Why?”
“What is land here is sea there.”
Shallan nodded dully. Wait. Think.
That was growing hard, but she forced herself to go over Pattern’s words again. When they’d sailed the ocean, and she’d visited Shadesmar, she’d found obsidian ground beneath her. But in Kharbranth, she’d dropped into that ocean of spheres.
“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.
“Go slowly.”
Shallan took a deep, cold breath, then nodded. She tried as she had before. Slowly, carefully. It was like . . . like opening her eyes in the morning.
Awareness of another place consumed her. The nearby trees popped like bubbles, beads forming in their place and dropping toward a shifting sea of them below. Shallan felt herself falling.
She gasped, then blinked back that awareness, closing her metaphoric eyes. That place vanished, and in a moment, she was back in the stand of trees.
Pattern hummed nervously.
Shallan set her jaw and tried again. More slowly this time, slipping into that place with its strange sky and not-sun. For a moment, she hovered between the worlds, Shadesmar overlaying the world around her like a shadowy afterimage. Holding between the two was difficult.
Use the Light, Pattern said. Bring them.
Shallan hesitantly drew the Light into herself. The spheres in the ocean below moved like a school of fish, surging toward her, clinking together. In her exhaustion, Shallan could barely maintain her double state, and she grew woozy, looking down.
She held on, somehow.
Pattern stood beside her, in his form with the stiff clothing and a head made of impossible lines, arms clasped behind his back, and hovering as if in the air. He was tall and imposing on this side, and she absently noticed that he cast a shadow the wrong way, toward the distant, cold-seeming sun instead of away from it.
“Good,” he said, his voice a deeper hum here. “Good.” He cocked his head, and though he had no eyes, turned around as if regarding the place. “I am from here, yet I remember so little . . .”
Shallan had a sense that her time was limited. Kneeling, she reached down and felt at the sticks she’d piled to form the place for her fire. She could feel the sticks—but as she looked into this strange realm, her fingers also found one of the glass beads that had surged up beneath her.
As she touched it, she noticed something sweeping through the air above her. She cringed, looking up to find large, birdlike creatures circling around her in Shadesmar. They were a dark grey and seemed to have no specific shape, their forms blurry.
“What . . .”
“Spren,”