Padan Fain
Padan Fain is a traveling peddler who calls each year with his wares and word from distant lands, and the local folk eagerly await his visits.
Padan Fain drives into Emond's Field at Festival time on a great wagon hung with clattering pots, its wheels taller than anyone in the crowd. He is pale and skinny, with gangly arms and a huge beak of a nose, and he is forever smiling and laughing as though at a joke nobody else is in on.
The villagers want word of the world outside the Two Rivers as much as his needles and tea, and Fain hands it out freely but teasingly, making a show of the telling that could rival a gleeman's. He enjoys having every eye on him and makes the crowd wait until its anticipation is as large as he wants. His friendliness is of a distant kind, all backslapping and no closeness.
Thom Merrilin, a gleeman, scorns him as always quick to carry bad news, the worse the faster, with more raven than man in him. Egwene objects that Master Fain is full of laughter and brings far more good news than bad.
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