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