Padan Fain

Padan Fain earned his living the way all peddlers do, hauling goods along back roads to villages that saw few strangers, but his real stock in trade was news. In a place as isolated as the Two Rivers, where word from the outside world arrived seldom and slow, the man who carried it was worth as much as anything in his wagon. Farmers and craftsmen alike turned out when he came over the Wagon Bridge, and he knew it.

He was a showman about it, too. Fain never gave away what he knew all at once; he doled it out in pieces, teasing a crowd along, savoring every moment that all of Emond's Field hung on his next word. Being the center of attention suited him the way a coat suits its owner, and he wore it without a trace of embarrassment. Whatever was stirring in far places, whether trouble in Ghealdan or talk drifting down from Tar Valon, it reached the Green through him first, and he made sure the villagers remembered that.

To the people of Emond's Field, from the boys who crowded close to the men of the Village Council, he was simply what he had always been: the peddler, the man who brought the world to their doorstep a few times a year and plainly enjoyed the bringing.