Words of Radiance

A Shardblade? What kind of constable of the law was this? Ym stared at that wondrous, silvery Blade.

Then he ran.

It appeared that he still had useful instincts from his time on the streets. He managed to fling a stack of leather toward the man and duck the Blade as it swung for him. Ym scrambled out onto the dark street and charged away, shouting. Perhaps someone would hear. Perhaps someone would help.

Nobody heard.

Nobody helped.

Ym was an old man now. By the time he reached the first cross street, he was gasping for air. He stopped beside the old barber shop, dark inside, door locked. The little spren moved along beside him, a shimmering light that sprayed outward in a circle. Beautiful.

“I guess,” Ym said, panting, “it is… my time. May One… find this memory… pleasing.”

Footsteps slapped on the street behind, getting closer.

“No,” the spren whispered. “Light!”

Ym dug in his pocket and pulled out a sphere. Could he use it, somehow, to—

The constable’s shoulder slammed Ym against the wall of the barber shop. Ym groaned, dropping the sphere.

The man in silver spun him around. He looked like a shade in the night, a silhouette against the black sky.

“It was forty years ago,” Ym whispered.

“Justice does not expire.”

The man shoved the Shardblade through Ym’s chest.

Experience ended.

I-3. Rysn

Rysn liked to pretend that her pot of Shin grass was not stupid, but merely contemplative. She sat near the prow of her catamaran, holding the pot in her lap. The otherwise still surface of the Reshi Sea rippled from the paddling of the guide behind her. The warm, damp air made beads of sweat form on Rysn’s brow and neck.

It was probably going to rain again. Precipitation here on the sea was the worst kind—not mighty or impressive like a highstorm, not even insistent like an ordinary shower. Here, it was just a misting haze, more than a fog but less than a drizzle. Enough to ruin hair, makeup, clothing—indeed, every element of a careful young woman’s efforts to present a suitable face for trading.

Rysn shifted the pot in her lap. She’d named the grass Tyvnk. Sullen. Her babsk had laughed at the name. He understood. In naming the grass, she acknowledged that he was right and she had been wrong; his trade with the Shin people last year had been exceptionally profitable.

Rysn chose not to be sullen at being proven so clearly wrong. She’d let her plant be sullen instead.

They’d traversed these waters for two days now, and then only after waiting at port for weeks until the right time between highstorms for a trip onto the nearly enclosed sea. Today, the waters were shockingly still. Almost as serene as those of the Purelake.

Vstim himself rode two boats over in their irregular flotilla. Paddled by new parshmen, the sixteen sleek catamarans were laden with goods that had been purchased with the profits of their last expedition. Vstim was still resting in the back of his boat. He looked like little more than another bundle of cloth, almost indistinguishable from the sacks of goods.

He would be fine. People got sick. It happened, but he would become well again.

And the blood you saw on his handkerchief?

She suppressed the thought and pointedly turned around in her seat, shifting Tyvnk to the crook of her left arm. She kept the pot very clean. That soil stuff the grass needed in order to live was even worse than crem, and it had a proclivity for ruining clothing.

Gu, the flotilla’s guide, rode in her own boat, just behind her. He looked a lot like a Purelaker with those long limbs, the leathery skin, and dark hair. Every Purelaker she’d met, however, had cared deeply about those gods of theirs. She doubted Gu had ever cared about anything.

That included getting them to their destination in a timely manner.

“You said we were near,” she said to him.

“Oh, we are,” he said, lifting his oar and then slipping it back down into the water. “Soon, now.” He spoke Thaylen rather well, which was why he’d been hired. It certainly wasn’t for his punctuality.

“Define ‘soon,’” Rysn said.

“Define…”

“What do you mean by ‘soon’?”

“Soon. Today, maybe.”

Maybe. Delightful.

Gu continued to paddle, only doing so on one side of the boat, yet somehow keeping them from going in circles. At the rear of Rysn’s boat, Kylrm—head of their guards—played with her parasol, opening it and closing it again. He seemed to consider it a wondrous invention, though they’d been popular in Thaylenah for ages now.

Shows how rarely Vstim’s workers get back to civilization. Another cheerful thought. Well, she’d apprenticed under Vstim wanting to travel to exotic places, and exotic this was. True, she’d expected cosmopolitan and exotic to go hand in hand. If she’d had half a wit—which she wasn’t sure she did, these days—she’d have realized that the really successful traders weren’t the ones who went where everyone else wanted to go.