POV: szeth
Summary
*Twenty-six years ago.* A boy Szeth stands in a ravine under the white-cliffed mountains, the bleating of nervous lambs rising around him. Dozens of shepherd families have crowded inland to flee the stonewalker raiders harrying the coast. Up here in the foothills, pebbles begin to appear in the soil — too small to be worshipped, too large to touch carelessly — and the clay lamps in the dark valley below look to him like swimming stars he is somehow floating above. He and his sister Elid manage to keep their flock from bleeding into the others; the sheep can sense their masters' fear.
He drifts toward his mother Zeenid at the firepits and is happily put to work mashing onions and garlic for misir wat. The Cook — a ruling peer of the Farmer in red skirt, blue sash and yellow blouse — has invented a segmented wooden measuring ladle with compartments for oil, onion, garlic, salt, chili and coriander, so a boy can produce the right proportions every time. Szeth loves it: a tool with which it is impossible to do the work wrong. So when the Cook strides past and declares his pot needs more pepper, then adds it herself, he is gutted. Why does he do things wrong even when he has a tool?
The Farmer arrives at the fireside in violet outer robe over sky-blue, his work-soiled farmer's clothing beneath as a sign — kindly oval face, dirt under the nails, his nobility self-evident. He hopes to find Neturo but settles for a plate the Cook brings him (one does not refuse her), and asks Szeth to come and dance for the farmers in the fields. *Dancing does not add*, Szeth protests, *it makes nothing and feeds nobody.* *If you think sweetening a person's life is not a form of feeding them*, the Farmer tells him, *you are still young.*
Szeth asks the question he is really asking: *colors-nimi, how do you know what to do?* The Farmer takes it seriously and turns it into a teaching. The difference between men and animals, he tells the boy, is that men can take actions: rain does not act when it falls, a rock does not act when it rolls — the spren move them. Spren move most things in the world, but they do not move people. The Stone Shamans teach the reason. *How do you know what to do?* the Farmer asks back. *I don't. I try. I see. I act.* He volunteers Molli the sheep as a counterexample — she chooses, Szeth insists, she comes to him when he is sad — and the Farmer gently dismisses it. The boy walks away with fewer answers than he hoped: if even the Farmer cannot simply know the right thing, what hope has he? *Perhaps I can find the spren, and ask them.* He has seen three in his short life, each glimpse fleeting. Neturo arrives at the fireside and the Farmer turns to talk softly with him.
Szeth carries plates to Elid up at the armpit of the valley, where she has been watching the dark. *We're missing three sheep*, she tells him. One of them is Molli. Szeth checks five nearby flocks with a lamp shielded under his hand and does not find her. Molli always makes her way home; she is the one he never needs to worry over. His eyes are drawn southwest, where a red haze stains the air over the coast — stonewalker fires at the fishing villages.
He should not. The Farmer's soldiers are at the coast; raiders should not strike as far inland as the homestead. But the day has been one long whisper that there are no correct answers, only decisions — the family's choice to move the worshipped stone, the Farmer's lesson on volition, the tool that did not protect him from getting his wat wrong. He puts out his lamp, trusts the filtered violet moonlight breaking through the clouds, and stalks alone into the night back toward the homestead, to find Molli. By himself — a choice he would not have made on any other night.