POV: rysn
Summary
Rysn sits the quiet quarterdeck of the Wandersail with only the captain and a skeleton crew, a watcher up in the eel's nest ready to call out trouble, and studies the sketches Rushu has sent across from the beach. Heaps of greatshell carapace. Untold gemheart riches. The picture is, she thinks, too perfect.
Cord climbs onto the quarterdeck instead of taking the dinghy ashore. The luckspren, she explains, have all gone down into the water — there is nothing in the sky for her up here. Rysn suggests she could go gather gemstones with the rest; everyone on this expedition will go home rich. Cord shakes her head: those are the *wrong* treasures. Pressed gently, she opens up about why she came on this voyage at all.
Her people are proud, she tells Rysn, but they are also weak as a nation. They have spent generations losing their best fighters trying to win Shards, and the only Plate and Blade they have belong to her father — who refuses on principle to use them. The Alethi, the Thaylens, the Vedens all have Shards; on the Peaks they have none. Rysn tries the polite trade-craft answer, that the Peaks are out of the way and other nations have no real reason to come; Cord finishes the thought for her — *and they don't want to.* Rysn has to admit her babsk used to say trading with the Horneaters was the work of the seventh fool: their goods were excellent, the trip was simply not worth it.
*That,* Cord says, *is how it has been for many years. Nothing worth the trip — nothing that people knew about.* The Alethi know now. The enemy has always known. The Peaks have a gateway — a path to the world of gods and spren — and once that becomes common knowledge, every strong nation that has been content to ignore the Horneaters will suddenly find them worth visiting, occupying, *protecting*. So she has come to find treasure. So her people can be strong. So strong. Her father, she adds bitterly, could be both Shardbearer and Radiant; he believes tradition matters more than that. She will do this thing instead. Rysn feels a stab of guilt for having assumed, when Cord said earlier that she wanted treasure, that the wanting was simple. Greed gets a great deal of pious talk; ambition out of nothing is not the same thing, and is not easily dismissed.
Asked why she does not join the inland expedition where any real Shards would be, Cord says the Radiants would claim those; she needs to look in a different direction, and the spren are showing her one. Then, abruptly, she thanks Rysn — for not believing her evil when Nikli tried, what is the word, to *frame* her. Cord turns over the new word with interest, complains about lowlander homophones, and says many people instinctively distrust foreign-looking strangers; Rysn believed her instead of her friend. Rysn gives Vstim the credit for teaching her to see the world differently, and promises Cord can thank him in person one day.
The thought of her babsk shakes something loose. Rysn remembers a trade-day long ago when Vstim had bargained with a counterpart who left spheres and gemstones strewn casually about his rooms, and bargained with that man harder and more cutthroat than usual. After, he had told her: people do not leave money out by accident. Either they want you to think they have more than they do, or they want you to fixate on the small treasure and miss the larger one. Rysn looks down at the sketches again — the gemhearts strewn on the beach like rockbuds, the perfectly arrayed bones. She asks Cord to fetch one of the sailors. She has a message that needs to go ashore to Rushu at once.