Perrin Rainlistener is a weather-reader and storykeeper of the Greenfold. His craft belongs to the practical lore of the Hearthkin: he reads rain, wind, soil and the movements of animals, and he keeps the stories that explain them. Lately his nights have been troubled. Perrin dreams of vast, old powers stirring beneath the world, and of a figure he knows only as "the man waiting for the first rain".
Appearance
Perrin is a lean, long-limbed man in the long middle of his life, a little stooped from years of bending to listen at gutters, roots and roof-edges. His olive-brown skin is weather-lined, his dark hair is threaded with gray and worn loose to the shoulders, and he pushes it behind his ears when he listens. His eyes are the soft gray of rain cloud, shadowed by nights of bad dreams. He dresses for weather, not for respect, in moss-green wool and a patched cape of oiled linen whose repairs are stitched in contrasting thread so they show. A small carved hart hangs at his neck, and from his belt hang bundles of knotted cords, his rain-records, in which every knot marks a storm, a dry month, a dream or a migration. He is most often found on a hillside above the orchards in the rain, among old standing stones, one palm open to the falling water and his eyes closed.
What he believes
Perrin loves the valley's weather and its stories, and he loves something plainer still: the right of ordinary people to make their own choices without a prophet telling them what the sky has decided. He wants to understand the signs of the old powers before they reach the Greenfold, but he refuses to become a seer whose words are obeyed. He knows how easily a sign becomes a claim to rule. The Crown's own storytellers insist that ancient prophecy foretold Vaelra, and that is exactly why his own dreams of her frighten him. So he often keeps his interpretations to himself, though others will read the signs anyway.
His place in the story
He watches deer and hares leave certain valleys in silence and wonders what they know that people do not. He trades signs with listeners far beyond the Greenfold, among them Orun Bellstone of the Stonebound, who hears deep rhythms beneath the Blackspine that sometimes echo in Perrin's dreams. Mara Brambleheart values him, but she needs his signs as evidence for an open moot, never as commands, and Perrin agrees with her more than he likes to admit. Whether his dreams are memory, warning or only possibility is something he has not yet learned to tell apart.