A few minutes later she stood in front of the mirror, wearing loose brown trousers, a white buttoned shirt, and a thin glove on her safehand. She felt naked with her hand exposed like that. The trousers weren’t so bad—darkeyed women wore them when working the plantation back home, though she’d never seen a lighteyed lady in them. But that glove . . .

She shivered, noticing that her false face blushed when she did. The nose moved when she wrinkled her own as well. That was a good thing, though she’d been hoping to be able to hide her embarrassment.

She pulled on one of Tyn’s white coats. The stiff thing went all the way down to the top of her boots, and she tied it at the waist with a thick black hogshide belt so that it was mostly closed in front, as Tyn had worn it. She finished by replacing the spheres in the pouch in her pocket with infused ones from the lamps in the room.

That flaw in her nose still bothered her. Something to shade the face, she thought, hurrying back to her trunk. There, she dug out Bluth’s white hat, the one with the sides that folded upward at a slant. Hopefully it would look better on her than it had on Bluth.

She put it on, and when she returned to the mirror, she was pleased with how it shaded her face. It did look kind of silly. But then, she felt that everything about this outfit looked silly. A gloved hand? Trousers? The coat had seemed imposing on Tyn—it indicated experience and a sense of personal style. When Shallan wore it, she looked like she was pretending. She saw through the illusion to the frightened girl from rural Jah Keved.

Authority is not a real thing. Jasnah’s words. It is mere vapors—an illusion. I can create that illusion . . . as can you.

Shallan stood up taller, straightened the hat, then went to the bedroom and tucked a few things in her pockets, including the map of where to go. She walked to the window and pulled it open. Fortunately, she was on the ground floor.

“Here we go,” she whispered to Pattern.

Out she went, into the night.

And thus were the disturbances in the Revv toparchy quieted, when, upon their ceasing to prosecute their civil dissensions, Nalan’Elin betook himself to finally accept the Skybreakers who had named him their master, when initially he had spurned their advances and, in his own interests, refused to countenance that which he deemed a pursuit of vanity and annoyance; this was the last of the Heralds to admit to such patronage.

—From Words of Radiance, chapter 5, page 17

The warcamp was still busy, despite the hour. She wasn’t surprised; her time in Kharbranth had taught her that not everyone treated the arrival of night as a reason to stop working. Here, there were nearly as many people about in the streets as when she’d first ridden through.

And almost nobody paid attention to her.

For once, she didn’t feel conspicuous. Even in Kharbranth, people had glanced at her—noticed her, considered her. Some had thought of robbing her, others of how to use her. A young lighteyes without proper escort was distinctive, and possibly an opportunity. However, while wearing straight dark hair and dark brown eyes, she might as well have been invisible. It was wonderful.

Shallan smiled, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her coat—she still felt embarrassed by that gloved safehand, though nobody even looked at it.

She reached an intersection. In one direction, the warcamp glittered with torches and oil lanterns. A market, busy enough that nobody trusted spheres in their lamps. Shallan walked toward it; she’d be safer on the more traveled streets. Her fingers crinkled on the paper in her pocket, and she drew it out as she stopped to wait for a group of chattering people to move from in front of her.

The map looked easy enough to parse. She just needed to get her bearings. She waited, then finally realized that the group in front of her wasn’t going to move. She was expecting them to defer to her as they would a lighteyes. Shaking her head at her foolishness, she went around them.

It continued like that; she was forced to squeeze through tight places between bodies, and was jostled as she walked. This market flowed like two rivers passing one another, with shops on either side and vendors peddling food in the center. It was even covered in some places by awnings that stretched across to the buildings on the other side.

Perhaps only ten paces across, it was a claustrophobic, bustling, jabbering mess. And Shallan loved it. She found herself wanting to stop and sketch half the people she passed. They all seemed so full of life, whether haggling or simply walking with a friend and chewing on a snack. Why hadn’t she gone out more in Kharbranth?

She stopped, grinning at a man performing a show with puppets and a box. Farther down the way, a Herdazian used a sparkflicker and some kind of oil to make bursts of flame in the air. If she could just stop off a little time and do a sketch of him . . .

No. She had business to be about. Part of her didn’t want to go forward with it, obviously, and her mind was trying to distract her. She was becoming increasingly aware of this defense of hers. She used it, she needed it, but she couldn’t let it control her life.

She did stop at the cart of a woman selling glazed fruit, however. They looked juicy and red, and had been stabbed through with a little stick before being dipped in a glassy melted sugar. Shallan pulled a sphere from her pocket and held it out.

The woman froze, staring at the sphere. Others stopped nearby. What was the problem? It was just an emerald mark. It wasn’t like she’d gotten out the broam.

She looked at the glyphs listing prices. A stick of candied fruit was a single clearchip. Denominations of spheres wasn’t something she’d often had to think about, but if she remembered . . .

Her mark was worth two hundred and fifty times the cost of the treat. Even in her family’s strained state, this wouldn’t have been considered much money to them. But that was on the level of houses and estates, not the level of street vendors and working darkeyes.

“Uh, I don’t think I can change that,” the woman said. “Er . . . citizen.” A title given to a wealthy darkeyes of the first or second nahn.

Shallan blushed. How many times was she going to prove just how naive she was? “It’s for one of the treats, and for some help. I’m new to the area. I could use some directions.”

“Expensive way to get directions, miss,” the woman said, but pocketed the sphere with deft fingers nonetheless.

“I need to find Nar Street.”

“Ah. You’re going the wrong storming way, miss. Back up the market flow, turn right. You’ll need to go, uh, six blocks, I think? It’s easy to find; the highprince made everyone lay out their buildings in squares, like in a proper city. Look for the taverns, and you’ll be there. But miss, I don’t think that’s the sort of place one like you should be visiting, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Even as a darkeyes, people thought her incapable of taking care of herself. “Thank you,” Shallan said, plucking out one of the sticks of candied fruit. She hastened away, crossing the flow to join those walking in the opposite direction through the market.

“Pattern?” she whispered.

“Mmm.” He was clinging to the outside of her coat, near the knees.

“Trail behind and watch to see if anyone follows me,” Shallan said. “Do you think you can do that?”

“They will make a pattern if they come,” he said, dropping to the ground. For a brief moment in the air, between coat and stone, he was a dark mass of twisting lines. Then he vanished like a drop of water hitting a lake.

Shallan hurried along with the flow, safehand securely gripping the sphere pouch in her coat pocket, freehand carrying the stick of fruit. She remembered all too well how Jasnah’s deliberate flashing of too much money in Kharbranth had lured thieves like vines to stormwater.

Shallan followed the directions, her sense of liberation replaced by anxiety. The corner she took out of the market led her to a roadway that was much less crowded. Was the fruit vendor trying to direct Shallan into a trap where she could be robbed easily? Head down, she hurried along the road. She couldn’t Soulcast to protect herself, not as Jasnah had. Storms! Shallan hadn’t even been able to make sticks catch fire. She doubted she’d be able to transform living bodies.

She had Lightweaving, but she was already using that. Could she Lightweave a second image at the same time? How was her disguise doing, anyway? It would be draining the Light from her spheres. She almost pulled them out to see how much was gone, then stopped herself. Fool. She was worried about being robbed, and so she considered revealing a handful of money?

She stopped after two blocks. Some people did walk this street, a handful of men in workers’ clothing heading home for the night. The buildings here certainly weren’t as nice as the ones she’d left behind.

“Nobody follows,” Pattern said from her feet.

Shallan jumped nearly to the rooftops. She raised her freehand to her breast, breathing in and out deeply. She really thought she could infiltrate a group of assassins? Her own spren often made her jump.

Tyn said that nothing would teach me, Shallan thought, but personal experience. I’m just going to have to muddle through these first few times and hope I get used to this before I get myself killed.

“Let’s keep moving,” Shallan said. “We’re running out of time.” She started forward, digging into the fruit. It really was good, though her nerves prevented her from fully enjoying it.

The street with the taverns was actually five blocks away, not six. Shallan’s increasingly wrinkled paper showed the meeting place as a tenement building across from a tavern with blue light shining through the windows.

Shallan tossed aside her fruit stick as she stepped up to the tenement building. It couldn’t be old—nothing in these warcamps could be more than five or six years old—but it looked ancient. The stones weathered, the window shutters hanging askew in places. She was surprised a highstorm hadn’t blown the thing over.

Fully aware that she could be striding into the whitespine’s den for dinner, she walked up and knocked. The door was opened by a darkeyed man the size of a boulder who had a beard trimmed like a Horneater’s. His hair did seem to have some red in it.

She resisted the urge to shuffle from one foot to the next as he looked her up and down. Finally, he opened the door all the way, motioning her in with thick fingers. She didn’t miss the large axe that leaned against the wall just next to him, illuminated by the single feeble Stormlight lamp—it looked like it only had a chip in it—on the wall.

Taking a deep breath, Shallan entered.

The place smelled moldy. She heard water dripping from somewhere farther inside, stormwater infallibly making its way from a leaking roof down, down, down to the ground floor. The guard did not speak as he led her along the hall. The floor was wood. There was something about walking on wood that made her feel as if she were going to fall through. It seemed to groan with every step. Good stone never did anything like that.

The guard nodded toward an opening in the wall, and Shallan stared into the blackness there. Steps. Down.