- We meet Katsa slinking through doors and passageways, into dungeons where she has been sent to immobilize the guards. She takes care of a slew of them before they even notice her presence, and the ones that do happen see her before she knocks them out mistake her for a Graceling boy, Graced with fighting (perhaps this is why Part I is called "The Lady Killer").
- It's through their mistaken perceptions that we learn that Katsa is in fact a Graceling—someone born with a superior skill of some sort.
- Katsa lets her accomplices, Giddon and Oll, know that they have fifteen minutes to rescue the Lienid elder being kept in King Murgon's dungeons, and then she sets off to take down the guards in the courtyard so no one will stand between them and their escape.
- Through Katsa's memories, we learn two things: (1) that back when she and the other members of the secret Council were planning this rescue, it was Katsa who insisted that the guards should be drugged—not killed; and (2) that she's Graced with killing, which is why her uncle, King Randa, has been using her as a mercenary to enforce his rule ever since she was a little girl. (She's eighteen now.)
- On her way out of the dungeons, Katsa knocks out and drugs several more guards before encountering someone interesting: a Lienid man who is obviously Graced with fighting. He seems like he'll be a worthy opponent, but then he does something weird: he tells Katsa he trusts her and steps aside.
- Unfortunately (for him), the feeling isn't mutual. Katsa knocks him out and drugs him, leaving him sleeping soundly along with the rest of the guards in Murgon's court.
- Katsa, Oll, and Giddon ride their horses at breakneck speeds in order to get the Lienid man they've rescued back to Randa City before daybreak. They've tied the old man, who's too weak to hold himself up, onto his horse, and they're worried about him because he seems very ill.