The Way of Kings

By tradition, a woman’s safepouch was where she kept items of intimate or very precious import. To search one would be like strip-searching her – considering her rank, either would be virtually unthinkable unless she were obviously implicated in a crime. Jasnah could probably force it. But if Jasnah could do that, she could order a search of Shallan’s room, and her trunk would be under particular scrutiny. The truth was, if Jasnah chose to suspect her, there would be little Shallan could do to hide the fabrial. So the safepouch was as good a place as any.

She gathered up the pictures she’d drawn and put them upside-down on the desk, trying not to look at them. She didn’t want those to be seen by the maid. Finally, she left, taking her portfolio. She felt that she needed to get outside and escape for a while. Draw something other than death and murder. The conversation with Nan Balat had only served to upset her more.

“Brightness?” the maid asked.

Shallan froze, but the maid held up a basket. “This was dropped off for you with the master-servants.”

She hesitantly accepted it, looking inside. Bread and jam. A note, tied to one of the jars, read: Bluebar jam. If you like it, it means you’re mysterious, reserved, and thoughtful. It was signed Kabsal.

Shallan placed the basket’s handle in the crook of her safearm’s elbow. Kabsal. Maybe she should go find him. She always felt better after a conversation with him.

But no. She was going to leave; she couldn’t keep stringing him, or herself, along. She was afraid of where the relationship was going. Instead, she made her way to the main cavern and then to the Conclave’s exit. She walked out into the sunlight and took a deep breath, looking up into the sky as servants and attendants parted around her, swarming in and out of the Conclave. She held her portfolio close, feeling the cool breeze on her cheeks and the contrasting warmth of the sunlight pressing down on her hair and forehead.

In the end, the most disturbing part was that Jasnah had been right. Shallan’s world of simple answers had been a foolish, childish place. She’d clung to the hope that she could find truth, and use it to explain – perhaps justify – what she had done back in Jah Keved. But if there was such a thing as truth, it was far more complicated and murky than she’d assumed.

Some problems didn’t seem to have any good answers. Just a lot of wrong ones. She could choose the source of her guilt, but she couldn’t choose to be rid of that guilt entirely.

Two hours – and about twenty quick sketches – later, Shallan felt far more relaxed.

She sat in the palace gardens, sketchpad in her lap, drawing snails. The gardens weren’t as extensive as her father’s, but they were far more varied, not to mention blessedly secluded. Like many modern gardens, they were designed with walls of cultivated shalebark. This one’s made a maze of living stone. They were short enough that, when standing, she could see the way back to the entrance. But if she sat down on one of the numerous benches, she could feel alone and unseen.

She’d asked a groundskeeper the name of the most prominent shalebark plant; he’d called it “plated stone.” A fitting name, as it grew in thin round sections that piled atop one another, like plates in a cupboard. From the sides, it looked like weathered rock that exposed hundreds of thin strata. Tiny little tendrils grew up out of pores, waving in the wind. The stonelike casings had a bluish shade, but the tendrils were yellowish.

Her current subject was a snail with a low horizontal shell edged with little ridges. When she tapped, it would flatten itself into a rift in the shalebark, appearing to become part of the plated stone. It blended in perfectly. When she let it move, it nibbled at the shalebark – but didn’t chew it away.

It’s cleaning the shalebark, she realized, continuing her sketch. Eating off the lichen and mold. Indeed, a cleaner trail extended behind it.

Patches of a different kind of shalebark – with fingerlike protrusions growing up into the air from a central knob – grew alongside the plated stone. When she looked closely, she noted little cremlings – thin and multilegged – crawling along it, eating at it. Were they too cleaning it?

Curious, she thought, beginning a sketch of the miniature cremlings. They had carapaces shaded like the shalebark’s fingers, while the snail’s shell was a near duplicate of the yellow and blue colorings of the plated stone. It was as if they had been designed by the Almighty in pairs, the plant giving safety to the animal, the animal cleaning the plant.

A few lifespren – tiny, glowing green specks – floated around the shalebark mounds. Some danced amid the rifts in the bark, others in the air like dust motes zigzagging up, only to fall again.