Rysn
POV: rysn
Summary
Rysn — fashionable young Thaylen apprentice in dyed wool and an outsized bone earring, five months into her babsk-bond with the trademaster Vstim — steps down from the wagon onto the spongy soil of Shinovar for the first time and prods the grass with the toe of her boot. The grass refuses to withdraw. She prods harder. It still refuses. She had imagined her master's caravans taking her to glittering exotic ports — Thaylen City, Azir, the markets of New Natanan — and instead he has brought her to a damp meadow shut behind the Misted Mountains from anything that resembles weather she knows. There are no spren on the wind here. The clouds do not have the right shape. The chickens, which she has been told are sacred, look the same as any other chickens.
A Shin farmer named Thresh-son-Esan meets the caravan at the field's edge with crated chickens, dried meats, and bolts of undyed cloth. Vstim trades the lot of it for several heavy boxes of Soulcast scrap metal — discarded mis-tries from Alethi ardents that no Vorin smith would touch, but which the Shin consider miraculous precisely because the metal bears no stain of broken rock. The negotiation astonishes Rysn: both men go out of their way to declare their own goods worthless, almost competitively, almost rudely. Afterwards Vstim explains the Shin way — undervalue your own goods and they will pay you well for them, overvalue your own goods and you will go home in your shirt — and then he asks Thresh, very lightly, whether there has lately been another Truthless to be had. Seven years ago Thresh traded him Szeth for nearly nothing and threw the payment into a river. He laughs the question off and quietly hopes there will never be another.
Vstim sees Rysn still glaring at the grass and hands her an empty pot. He tells her to dig up a clump of grass with a good plug of soil and to keep it in her room until she stops thinking of it as odd. She grumbles and goes to find a knife.