At the training ring, Nesta and Cassian wait tensely for Gwyn to arrive for her first lesson. Gwyn enters afraid but determined, especially because stepping into the open air is her first time truly outside in years. Cassian keeps the lesson gentle and practical, and Gwyn quickly understands the physical basics better than Nesta had at first. Afterward, Gwyn explains that she joined because she never wants to feel powerless again, and Nesta quietly admits she feels the same, creating a deeper bond between them.

Later, Nesta travels with Cassian to Windhaven while Cassian goes to meet Eris. Nesta visits Emerie’s shop and finds Emerie being pressured by Bellius, her drunken cousin, who has come on behalf of Emerie’s uncle to challenge her ownership of the store. Nesta deliberately provokes Bellius and backs Emerie until he leaves. Once he is gone, Emerie explains that Bellius and the rest of her father’s family periodically try to intimidate her into surrendering the business, and Nesta recognizes the familiar pattern of cruelty and coercion from her own past.

Bellius’s harassment prompts Nesta to remember earlier humiliations and violence in the human lands: her harsh grandmother, the family’s poverty, and the time Tomas Mandray tried to assault her after she ended their arrangement. Those memories underline why Nesta responds so sharply to threats against Emerie. Even so, Emerie treats Nesta with easy kindness and offers to let her pay for warm leathers in installments, a generosity that unsettles Nesta because she is unused to receiving it.

Emerie invites Nesta to lunch in the back room, and the meal becomes an unexpectedly intimate conversation. They discuss avoiding marriage, cooking, Nesta’s merchant father and the wider world, and the losses in both of their families. Emerie reveals that her father’s relatives still feel entitled to her inheritance despite laws protecting female ownership, and that pain from her clipped wings still troubles her. Nesta realizes Emerie is lonely and trapped in Windhaven, then finally explains that Cassian’s training is open to females who have endured hardship and invites Emerie to join them. Emerie refuses for practical and social reasons, but Nesta leaves the offer open.

In the final scene, Cassian meets Eris in the Illyrian Steppes and briefs him on the Dread Trove. Eris says he has never heard of the objects, warns that if the Trove is sentient it may be calling to others besides Briallyn and Koschei, and confirms that Briallyn appears to be hiding her larger plans from Beron. Cassian urges secrecy because Beron gaining such power would be disastrous. After Eris departs, Cassian is left unsettled, sensing that the threat surrounding the Trove is growing.