POV: szeth
Summary
Twenty-six years before the main story, Szeth-son-Neturo dances around the family stone on the grassland near his father's homestead, eleven years old and already considered the best dancer in the village. He moves through the memorized steps first — rigid like the limbs of the oak — then loosens and becomes the wind, sweat flying, bare feet finding and leaving the packed earth at the edge of the grass. His sister Elid-daughter-Zeenid, three years older, plays the flute as accompaniment from where she lies on the grass; the music is the voice of the air. The only audience besides her is old blind Molli the ewe, who has wandered onto the dancing track again and is trying to eat the sacred stone at its centre. He stops, panting, and lets the bleating of the sheep be his applause.
He goes for water at the clay trough by the wooden homestead — boards held together by wooden pegs, no metal — and watches his father Neturo plug a hole in the roof up above. Neturo is between assignments overseeing the region's other shepherds and works on the house he and his brothers built. The majority of the flock grazes in the far field; Szeth prefers when they keep close enough to the homestead that he can dance for the stone.
He ties his own splash back on — a red handkerchief at his neck, the single piece of vivid colour their people who *add* are permitted — and counts the sheep. Elid, whose splash is a bright orange apron, lies on her back and asks whether he believes the stories of the lands across the mountains — the lands of the stonewalkers. Szeth thinks the outsiders walk on stone constantly because there is simply more of it there; the plants must be terrible vines like the ones in the tidal pools, since the stories say everyone is always being eaten. Elid suspects they eat each other. Szeth glances toward the ocean — visible only on the clearest days — and tells himself this is the perfect place to live, because his family can add beneath the Farmer's eyes without ever needing to subtract.
Then Elid says the dangerous thing, half to the sky: do you think the servants of the monasteries will ever come out and fight for the people, the way they practise with the Blades? Mother says they do. *Elid!* Szeth snaps; the shamans would never subtract — they keep their practice for the Voidbringers when they come. *I saw an Honorbearer once*, she adds, dreamily. *She could fly.* He shushes her — *don't speak of it in the open*. If the outsiders ever realised what the monasteries kept, the raiders that already come from the ocean would come for those too.
She rolls her eyes at him. He gives up on his sister, pulls away from Molli after a long hug of her scratchy wool, and then notices what the ewe has been licking. Not the family stone she always licks; a smaller one, only a handspan across, peeking up from the packed earth of the dancing ring as though revealed by the previous night's rain. He recoils — *part shocked, part terrified*. Had he stepped on it while dancing? He has never seen a stone *emerge*; all the ones in other villages and fields are old and carefully marked off and properly revered, never new and never anywhere a foot might have come down on them. Elid rises beside him, follows his gesture, and gasps. They share a look — and Szeth runs to fetch Neturo.