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“I’ve got some letters here,” Gaz said from the bedroom. “There are also some books that seem like she handwrote them.”
“Gather it all,” Shallan said. “We’ll sort it out later. I need to go ask Adolin something.”
She carried the carafe out to him. Several guards watched the door, and it didn’t seem anyone in the warcamp had noticed the attack. At least, no one had come knocking.
Shallan pointedly ignored—then forced herself to look at—the body again. Adolin stepped over to meet her, speaking softly. “We should get going. A couple of the guards escaped. We might want to write for some Windrunners to meet us for quicker extraction. And … what happened to your shoes?”
Shallan glanced at her bare feet, which poked out from under her dress. “They were impeding my ability to think.”
“Your…” Adolin ran a hand through his delightfully messy hair, blond speckled with black. “Love, you’re deliciously weird sometimes.”
“The rest of the time, I’m just tastelessly weird.” She held up the carafe. “Drink. It’s for science.”
He frowned, but tried a sip, then grimaced.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Shin ‘wine.’ They have no idea how to ferment a proper alcohol. They make it all out of the same strange little berry.”
“Exotic indeed…” Shallan said. “We can’t leave quite yet. Pattern and I have a secret to tease out.”
“Mmm…” Pattern said from her skirt. “I wish I had shoes to take off so my brain would work right.” He paused. “Actually, I don’t think I have a brain.”
“We’ll be back in a second,” she said, returning to the room with the wine hutch. Red had joined Gaz in the extremely tiny bedchamber. There were no windows, with barely enough room to stand. It held a mattress with no frame and a trunk that apparently stored the notes and letters Gaz had gathered.
Ialai would expect those to be found. There might be secrets in them, but not what Shallan hunted. Ialai moved here after her palace burned down. She slept in a closet and refused to leave this fortress. And still Mraize got not one, but two people in to kill her.
Shin wine. Was that the clue? Something about the hutch? She glanced it over, then got out her sketchpad.
“Pattern,” she said, “search the room for patterns.”
Pattern hummed and moved off her skirt—rippling the floor as he moved across it, as if he were somehow inside the stone, making the surface bulge. As he began searching, she did a sketch of the hutch.
There was something about committing an object to memory, then freezing it into a drawing, that let her see better. She could judge the spaces between the drawers, the thickness of the wood—and she soon knew there was no room in the hutch for hidden compartments.
She shooed away a couple of creationspren, then stood. Patterns, patterns, patterns. She scanned the carpet, then the painted designs on the upper trim of the room. Shinovar. Was the Shin wine truly important, or had she mistaken the clue?
“Shallan,” Pattern said from across the room. “A pattern.”
Shallan hurried to where he dimpled the rock of the wall, near the far northwest corner. Kneeling, she found that the stones did have a faint pattern to them. Carvings that—worn by time—she could barely feel beneath her fingers.
“This building,” she said, “it’s not new. At least part of it was already standing when the Alethi arrived at the warcamps. They built the structure on an already-set foundation. What are the markings? I can barely make them out.”
“Mmm. Ten items in a pattern, repeating,” he said.
This one feels a little like a glyph.… she thought. These warcamps dated back to the shadowdays, when the Epoch Kingdoms had stood. Ten kingdoms of humankind. Ten glyphs? She wasn’t certain she could interpret ancient glyphs—even Jasnah might have had trouble with that—but maybe she didn’t have to.
“These stones run around the base of the wall,” Shallan said. “Let’s see if any of the other carvings are easier to make out.”
A few of the stones were indeed better preserved. They each bore a glyph—and what appeared to be a small map in the shape of one of the old kingdoms. Most were indistinct blobs, but the crescent shape of Shinovar’s mountains stood out.
Shin wine. A map with the Shinovar mountains. “Find every block with this shape on it,” she told Pattern.
He did so, every tenth block. She moved along to each one until, on the third try, the stone wiggled. “Here,” she said. “In the corner. I think this is right.”
“Mmm…” he said. “A few degrees off, so technically acute.”
She carefully slid the stone out. Inside, like the mythical gemstone cache from a bedtime tale, she found a small notebook. She glanced up and checked whether Gaz and Red were still in the other room. They were.
Damnation, she has me distrusting my own agents, Shallan thought, slipping the notebook into her safepouch and replacing the stone. Maybe Ialai’s only plan had been to sow chaos, distrust. But … Shallan couldn’t entirely accept that theory, not with how haunted Ialai had seemed. It wasn’t hard to believe the Ghostbloods had been hunting her; Mraize had infiltrated Amaram and Ialai’s inner circle a year ago, but hadn’t gone with them when they’d fled Urithiru.
Though Shallan itched to peek through the notebook, Gaz and Red emerged with a pillowcase full of notes and letters. “If there’s anything more in there,” Gaz said, thumbing over his shoulder, “we can’t find it.”
“It will have to do,” Shallan said as Adolin waved her to join him. “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
Kaladin hesitated, spear held toward Moash’s throat. He could end the man. Should end the man. Why did he hesitate?
Moash … had been his friend. They’d spent hours by the fire, talking about their lives. Kaladin had opened his heart to this man, in ways he hadn’t to most of the others. He’d told Moash, like Teft and Rock, of Tien. Of Roshone. Of his fears.
Moash wasn’t just a friend though. He was beyond that a member of Bridge Four. Kaladin had sworn to the storms and the heavens above—if anyone was there watching—that he’d protect those men.
Kaladin had failed Moash. As soundly as he’d failed Dunny, Mart, and Jaks. And of them all, losing Moash hurt the most. Because in those callous eyes, Kaladin saw himself.
“You bastard,” Kaladin hissed.
“You deny that I was justified?” Moash kicked at Roshone’s body. “You know what he did. You know what he cost me.”
“You killed Elhokar for that crime!”
“Because he deserved it, like this one did.” Moash shook his head. “I did this for you too, Kal. You would let your brother’s soul cry into the storms, unavenged?”
“Don’t you dare speak of Tien!” Kaladin shouted. He felt himself slipping, losing control. It happened whenever he thought of Moash, of King Elhokar dying, of failing the people of Kholinar and the men of the Wall Guard.
“You claim justice?” Kaladin demanded, waving toward the corpses chained to the wall. “What about Jeber and that other man. You killed them for justice?”
