Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

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.

“Hard,” Gu said, still paddling with his lethargic pace. “Patterns are off, these days. The gods do not walk where they always should. We shall find her. Yes, we shall.”

Rysn stifled a sigh and turned forward. With Vstim incapacitated again, she was in charge of leading the flotilla. She wished she knew where she was leading it—or even knew how to find their destination.

That was the trouble with islands that moved.

The boats glided past a shoal of branches breaking the sea’s surface. Encouraged by the wind, gentle waves lapped against the stiff branches, which reached out of the waters like the fingers of drowning men. The sea was deeper than the Purelake, with its bafflingly shallow waters. Those trees would be dozens of feet tall at the very least, with bark of stone. Gu called them i-nah, which apparently meant bad. They could slice up a boat’s hull.

Sometimes they’d pass branches hiding just beneath the glassy surface, almost invisible. She didn’t know how Gu knew to steer clear of them. In this, as in so much else, they just had to trust him. What would they do if he led them into an ambush out here on these silent waters? Suddenly, she felt very glad that Vstim had ordered their guards to monitor his fabrial that showed if people were drawing near. It—

Land.

Rysn stood up in the catamaran, making it rock precariously. There was something ahead, a distant dark line.

“Ah,” Gu said. “See? Soon.”

Rysn remained standing, waving for her parasol when a sprinkle of rain started to fall. The parasol barely helped, though it was waxed to double as an umbrella. In her excitement, she hardly gave it—or her increasingly frizzy hair—a thought. Finally.

The island was much bigger than she’d expected. She’d imagined it to be like a very large boat, not this towering rock formation jutting from the waters like a boulder in a field. It was different from other islands she’d seen; there didn’t seem to be any beach, and it wasn’t flat and low, but mountainous. Shouldn’t the sides and top have eroded over time?

“It’s so green,” Rysn said as they drew closer.

“The Tai-na is a good place to grow,” Gu said. “Good place to live. Except when it’s at war.”

“When two islands get too close,” Rysn said. She’d read of this in preparation, though there were not many scholars who cared enough about the Reshi to write of them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these moving islands floated in the sea. The people on them lived simple lives, interpreting the movements of the islands as divine will.

“Not always,” Gu said, chuckling. “Sometimes close Tai-na is good. Sometimes bad.”

“What determines?” Rysn asked.

“Why, the Tai-na itself.”

“The island decides,” Rysn said flatly, humoring him. Primitives. What was her babsk expecting to gain by trading here? “How can an island—”

Then the island ahead of them moved.

Not in the drifting way she’d imagined. The island’s very shape changed, stones twisting and undulating, a huge section of rock rising in a motion that seemed lethargic until one appreciated the grand scale.

Rysn sat down with a plop, her eyes wide. The rock—the leg—lifted, streaming water like rainfall. It lurched forward, then crashed back down into the sea with incredible force.

The Tai-na, the gods of the Reshi Isles, were greatshells.

This was the largest beast she’d ever seen, or ever heard of. Big enough to make mythological monsters like the chasmfiends of distant Natanatan seem like pebbles in comparison!

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she demanded, looking back at the boat’s other two occupants. Surely Kylrm at least should have said something.