POV: yumi
Summary
The narrator turns the camera around on himself for a stretch, reluctantly. He arrived on this planet, he says, and immediately froze in place — months of full awareness sliding gradually into a half-asleep trance. By the time the story proper begins, he and Design have been in Kilahito a bit over three years, Roshar time. He cannot fully explain how, then, he is able to narrate any of this; the best he can offer is that some Connection between him and the two principals carries it to him, first as overheard dialogue — Painter's voice close, Yumi's softer and warped — and then as images painted directly into his perception in magenta and teal, anywhere from bare two-line figures to full-motion scenes depending on how attentive he is. The intricacies, he admits, sometimes baffle even arcanists. The point of the digression is that he isn't going anywhere or doing anything interesting himself any time soon, so the reader's attention should stay where it belongs.
Yumi wakes on the stone floor of her wagon, sore from the previous day's summoning, bathed and re-dressed in her formal sleeping gown, surrounded by a circle of flower petals and a ring of luck-seeds. Her wagon has been lowered for the night so the cooling stone can soak warmth into her — a comfort she usually loves and barely feels now. She curls under the blanket and waits for something like pride to arrive over what she did and finds only exhaustion, then guilt over the missing pride, then shame at the guilt. Heat seeps up around her but seems not to reach her core.
Liyun comes in. She does not congratulate. She observes, in her soft rasping voice, that the record will make other towns wonder whether Yumi was always capable of thirty-seven and has been holding back on them; she is certain, of course, that this is wisdom in Yumi, and not the kind of pacing failure that would shame a warden. She tells Yumi to be ready for a strong showing in Gongsha Town tomorrow, and reminds her — in honorific — that a yoki-hijo is a resource to the land, like water from a steamwell, and squandering herself is squandering her position. On the way out she pauses with an oddly haunted edge in her voice and says she fears this will happen again unless she does something; perhaps she will seek advice. She is failing, she says, as warden. The door clicks shut.
Yumi does not sleep. She crosses to the window and watches the night crop — clusters of floating rice plants drifting back to the cooling stone as the thermals slacken, occasional gusts jetting a few skyward, night farmers padding between them with broad fans to keep them penned. A leashed tree shivers and lays branch-shadows across her face. She allows herself, briefly, the thought that she could simply climb out of the window — that no night farmer would stop a yoki-hijo — and the thought of what she cannot escape: the ceremonial nightgown, the chosenness, the blessing-as-cage. She is, she thinks, imprisoned at birth.
A voice answers in her mind — soft, sympathetic, telling her it knows what she feels. She spins, and senses it: a powerful spirit, but unlike any she has ever summoned. Spirits do hear her thoughts; almost none ever answer them. This one does. It is tired, distant, and seems to be reaching her from somewhere as far away as the daystar burning on the horizon. She is bound, it tells her — and so are it and its kind, in the same way. It thanks her for her hard work today and offers, as in the old stories of mortals receiving spirit-blessings, a gift. She lowers her eyes — in what she experiences as the hardest moment of her life — and refuses, declaring that she has already been blessed with the greatest gift a mortal can have. Then, the spirit answers, could she instead give it a boon? That never happens in the stories. It tells her that it and its kind are trapped in some far worse existence than the paired spheres of light she made for the town, that they cannot free themselves, but that there is one who can help her help them. She bows her head and accepts, vowing to do whatever she can. The spirit asks her, simply, to free them. Everything goes black.