The Wheel of Time, page 30
“I still say,” Bukama began, then bit off an oath. “Where did she go?”
Alys’ bowl sat empty on the table where she had been sitting, but there was no sign of the woman herself. Lan’s eyebrows rose in admiration in spite of himself. He had not heard a sound of her leaving.
Scraping his bench back noisily, Ryne rushed to one of the arrowslits and peered out. “Her horse is still there. Maybe she’s just visiting the privy.” Lan winced inwardly at the crudity. There were matters one spoke of and matters one did not. Ryne fingered one of his braids, then gave it a hard tug that made its bells jingle. “I say we leave her her silver and go before she comes back.”
“Go if you wish,” Lan said, rising. “Bukama pledged to her, and I’ll honor his pledge.”
“Better if you honor your own,” Bukama grumbled.
Ryne grimaced and gave his braid another hard pull. “If you stay, I stay.”
Perhaps the woman had just gone out for a glimpse of the festivities. Telling Bukama to remain in case she returned, Lan took Ryne out to see. She was nowhere among the dancers or the onlookers, though. In her silks, she would have stood out among all that embroidered linen and wool. Some of the women asked them to dance, and Ryne smiled at the prettier ones—the man would stop to smile at a pretty face if a dozen Trollocs were charging him!—but Lan sent him off to look among the houses on the southern hill, while he climbed the one behind The Plowman’s Blade. He did not want Alys meeting someone behind his back, perhaps arranging some surprise for later in the day. Just because the woman had not tried to kill him did not mean Edeyn wanted him alive.
He found her in a nearly empty street halfway up the hill, receiving the curtsy of a lean young woman whose blouse and wide trousers were embroidered in red and gold patterns as intricate as those on Alys’ riding dress. Kandori were as bad as southerners when it came to embroidery. Stepping softly, he closed to listening distance of Alys’ back and stopped.
“There’s some Saheras live three streets that way, my Lady,” the lean woman said with a gesture. “And I think there’s some live on South Hill. But I don’t know if any are named Avene.”
“You have been a great help, Mistress Marishna,” Alys said warmly. “Thank you.” Accepting another curtsy, she stood watching the other woman walk on uphill. Once Mistress Marishna was beyond earshot, she spoke again, and her voice was anything but warm. “Shall I show you how eavesdropping is punished in the White Tower, Master Lan?”
He very nearly blinked. First she managed to leave the common without him hearing, and now she heard him when he was trying to be quiet. Remarkable. Perhaps she was Aes Sedai. Which meant she might be looking at Ryne for a Warder.
“I think not,” he told the back of her head. “We have business in Chachin that cannot wait. Perhaps your search will go more quickly if we help you find this Avene Sahera.”
She turned very quickly and peered up at him, straining for height. He thought she might be up on her toes. No, she was no Aes Sedai, despite the icy look of command on her face. He had seen shorter Aes Sedai dominate rooms full of men who had no idea who they were, and without any straining.
“Better for you to forget hearing that name,” she said coldly. “It is unwise to meddle in the affairs of Aes Sedai. You may leave me, now. But I expect to find you ready to go on when I am done. If, that is, Malkieri keep their word as I have been told they do.” With that insult, she stalked off in the direction the lean woman had pointed. Light, the woman had a tongue like a knife!
When he returned to The Plowman’s Blade and told Bukama what he had learned, the older man brightened. Well, his scowl lessened a little. For him, that was as good as a grin from anyone else. “Maybe all she wants from us is protection until she finds this woman.”
“That doesn’t explain why she followed us for a whole day,” Lan said, dropping onto the bench in front of his breakfast bowl. He might as well finish the porridge. “And don’t suggest she was afraid to approach us. I think that woman frightens as easily as you do.” Bukama had no answer for that.
Chapter
21
Some Tricks of the Power
Lan knew the ride to Chachin would be one he would rather forget, and the journey met his expectations. They rode hard, passing merchants’ trains of wagons, never stopping long in a village and sleeping under the stars most nights, since no one had the coin for inns, not for four people with horses. Barns and haylofts had to do, when there was a barn or hayloft to be found come nightfall. Many of the hills along the road bore neither village nor farm, only towering oak and leatherleaf, pine and fir, with smaller beech and sourgum scattered through. In the Borderlands, there were no such things as isolated farms; sooner or later, a farm set off by itself became a graveyard.
Alys continued her search for the Sahera woman in every village they passed, though she fell silent whenever Lan or one of the others approached, and eyed them frostily until they went away. The woman had a ready way with a frosty eye. For him, anyway. Ryne twitched and peered wide-eyed at her, fetched and trotted and offered up compliments like a courtier on a leash, still bouncing between enraptured and fearful, and she accepted his subservience and his praise alike as her due while laughing at his witticisms.
Not that she focused only on him. She seldom let an hour go by without probing questions directed at each of them in turn, till it seemed she wanted to know the entire story of their lives. The woman was like a swarm of blackflies; no matter how many you swatted, there were always more to bite. Even Ryne knew enough to deflect that sort of interrogation. A man’s past belonged to himself and the people who had lived it with him; it was not a matter for gossip with an inquisitive woman. Despite her questions, Bukama continued his carping. Day and night, it seemed every second comment out of his mouth regarded the pledge. Lan began to think the only way to silence the man would be to take oath not to give her the pledge.
Twice thick black clouds rolled down out of the Blight to unleash driving downpours of freezing rain mixed with hail large enough to crack a man’s head. The worst storms in spring came from the Blight. When the first of those clouds darkened the sky to the north, he began looking for a place where the trees’ branches might be thick enough to afford some shelter, maybe with the aid of blankets stretched overhead, but when Alys realized what he was doing, she said coolly, “There is no need to stop, Master Lan. You are under my protection.”
Doubtful of that, he was still looking when the storm struck. Lightning flashed in blue-white streaks across a sky that seemed suddenly night and thunder crashed like monstrous kettledrums overhead, but the driving rain sheeted down an invisible dome that moved with their horses, and the hailstones bounced off it in an eerie silence, as though they had struck nothing at all. She performed the same service for the second storm, and both times, she seemed surprised at their offered thanks. Her face hardly altered in its smoothness, a very good imitation of an Aes Sedai’s serene expression, but something flickered about her eyes. A strange woman.
They saw bandits, as rumored, usually a pack of ten or twelve roughly dressed men who counted the odds against three with arrows nocked and melted back into the trees before Lan and the rest reached them. He or Bukama always went after them, just far enough to make sure they really had gone, while the other two guarded Alys. It would have been foolish to ride into an ambush they knew might be waiting.
Noon on the fourth day found them riding through the forested hills along a road that stretched empty as far as the eye could see in either direction. The sky was clear, with just a few scattered white clouds drifting high up, and the only sounds were their horses’ hooves and squirrels chittering on branches. Suddenly horsemen burst from the trees on both sides of the road some thirty paces ahead, twenty or so scruffy fellows who formed a line blocking the way, and the pounding of hooves told of more behind.
Dropping his reins on the pommel of his saddle, Lan snatched two more arrows and held them between his fingers as he drew the one already nocked. He doubted he would have time for even a second shot, but there was always a chance. Three of the men in front of him wore much-battered breastplates stained with rust over their dirty coats, and one had a rust-spotted helmet with a barred faceguard. None carried a bow, not that that made any great difference.
“Twenty-three behind at thirty paces,” Bukama called. “No bows. On your word.”
No difference at all, against a band large enough to attack most merchant trains. He did not loose, however. So long as the men only sat their horses, a chance remained. A small one. Life and death often turned on small chances.
“Let’s not be too hasty,” the helmeted man called, removing it to reveal a grizzled head of greasy hair and a narrow, dirty face that had last been touched by a razor a week gone. His wide smile showed two missing teeth. “You might be able to kill two or three of us before we cut you down, but there’s no need for that. Let us have your coin and the pretty lady’s jewelry, and you can go on your way. Pretty ladies in silk and fur always have lots of jewels, eh?” He leered past Lan at Alys. Maybe he thought it a friendly smile.
There was no temptation in the offer. These fellows wanted no casualties among themselves if they could manage it so, but surrender meant that he and Bukama and Ryne would have their throats slit. They probably intended to keep Alys alive until they decided she was a danger. If she had some trick of the Power up her sleeve, he wished she would—
“You dare impede the way of an Aes Sedai?” she thundered, and it was thunder, setting some of the brigands’ horses snorting and plunging. Cat Dancer, knowing what dropped reins meant, remained still beneath him, awaiting the pressures of knee and heel. “Surrender or face my wrath!” And red fire exploded with a roar above the bandits’ heads, sending more of their mounts into panicked bucking that tumbled two of the poorer riders to the road.
“I told you she was Aes Sedai, Coy,” whined a fat, balding fellow in a breastplate that was too small for him. “Didn’t I say that, Coy? A Green with her three Warders, I said.”
The lean man backhanded him across the face without taking his eyes from Lan. Or more likely, from Alys, behind him.
“No talk of surrender, now. There’s still fifty of us and four of you. Rather than face the noose, we’ll take our chances on how many you can kill before we take you.”
“Well and good,” Lan said. “But if I can see one of you at the count of ten, it begins.” With the last word, he started counting in a loud voice.
The bandits did not let him reach two before they were galloping back toward the trees; by four, the dismounted pair stopped trying to gain the saddles on their wild-eyed animals and took off afoot as fast as they could go. There was no need to follow. The pounding and crackle of horses being galloped through brush rather than around it was fast fading into the distance. In the circumstances, it was the best end that could be hoped for. Except that Alys did not see it so.
“You had no right to let them go,” she said indignantly, anger flashing in her eyes as she did her best to skewer each of them with her gaze. She reined her mare around to make certain they each received a dose. “Had they attacked, I could have used the One Power against them. How many people have they robbed and murdered, how many women ravished, how many children orphaned? We should have fought them and taken the survivors to the nearest magistrate.”
Lan, Bukama and Ryne took turns trying to convince her how unlikely it was that any of the four of them would have been among the survivors—the bandits would have fought hard to avoid the gallows, and sheer numbers did count—but she actually seemed to believe she could have defeated close on fifty men by herself. A very strange woman.
Had it been only storms and bandits, that would have been more than he expected on any journey. Ryne’s foolishness and Bukama’s complaints could have been taken as a matter of course, too. But Alys was blind about a great deal, and that made all the difference.
That first night he had sat in the wet to let her know he would accept what she had done. If they were to travel together, better to end it with honors even, as she must see it. Except that she did not. The second night she remained awake till dawn and made sure he did as well, with sharp flicks of an invisible switch whenever he nodded off. The third night, sand somehow got inside his clothes and boots, a thick coating of it. He had shaken out what he could and, without water to wash, rode covered in grit the next day. The night after the bandits…. He could not understand how she managed to make ants crawl into his smallclothes, or make them all bite at once. It had been her doing for sure. She was standing over him when his eyes shot open, and she appeared surprised that he did not cry out.
Clearly, she wanted some response, some reaction, but he could not see what. If she felt that she had not been repaid for her wetting, then she was a very hard woman, but a woman could set the price for her insult or injury, and there were no other women here to call an end when she went beyond what they considered just. All he could do was endure until they reached Chachin. The following night she discovered a patch of blisterleaf near their campsite, and to his shame, he almost lost his temper.
He did not mention the incidents to Bukama or Ryne, of course, though he was certain they knew, but he began to pray for Chachin to loom up ahead at the next rise. Perhaps Edeyn had set the woman to watch him, but it was beginning to seem she meant to kill him after all. Slowly.
Moiraine could not understand the stubbornness of this Lan Mandragoran, though Siuan said that “stubborn” was a redundancy when it came to men. All she wanted was a display of remorse for dunking her. Well, that and an apology. An abject apology. And a proper regard for an Aes Sedai. But he never displayed the slightest scrap of penitence. He was frozen arrogance to the core! His disbelief of her right to the shawl was so plain he might as well have spoken aloud. A part of her admired his fortitude, but only a part. She would bring him properly to heel. Not to tame him utterly—a completely tame man was no use to himself or anyone else—but to make certain he recognized his mistakes right down to his bones.
She allowed him his days to reflect, while she planned what she would do to him that night. The ants had been a great disappointment. That was one of the Blue Ajah secrets, a way to repel insects or make them gather and bite or sting, though not intended for the use she had put it to. But she was quite proud of the blisterleaf, which at least made him jump a bit, proving that he really was made of human flesh. She had begun to doubt that.
Oddly, neither of the other men ever offered him a word of commiseration that she heard, though they had to know what she was doing. If he voiced no complaints to her, which was peculiar enough in itself, surely he did to his friends; that was one thing friends were for. But the three were strangely reticent in other ways, too. Even in Cairhien people would talk about themselves, a little, and she had been taught that Borderlanders shunned the Game of Houses, yet they revealed almost nothing about themselves even after she primed their tongues with incidents from her own youth in Cairhien and from the Tower. Ryne at least laughed when the story was funny—once he realized he was supposed to laugh, he did—but Lan and Bukama actually looked embarrassed. She thought that was the emotion they displayed; they could have taught Aes Sedai to control their faces. They admitted having met sisters before her, but when she probed ever so delicately to learn where and when….
“There are Aes Sedai so many places that they are difficult to recall,” Lan replied one evening as they rode ahead of their own long shadows. “We had best stop at those farmhouses ahead and see whether we can hire the use of a hayloft for the night. We won’t see another house till well after full dark.”
That was typical. Those three could have taught Aes Sedai about oblique answers and deflecting questions, too.
Worst of all, she still had no idea whether any of them were Darkfriends. Of course, she had no real reason to think that any of the sisters in Canluum had been Black Ajah, and if they were not, Ryne’s visit to The Gates of Heaven likely had had some purely innocent purpose, yet wariness made her continue her questions. She still laid a ward around each of them every night. She could not afford to trust anyone except Siuan until she was sure of them. Other Aes Sedai and any men who might be involved with them least of all.
Two days from Chachin, in a village called Ravinda, she finally located Avene Sahera, the very first woman she spoke to in the place. Ravinda was a thriving village, though much smaller than Manala, with a wide field of hard-packed dirt that served as a market for folk from neighboring villages to barter produce and handcrafts and buy from peddlers. Two peddlers’ wagons, their tall canvas covers festooned with pots and pans, stood surrounded by crowds when she and her reticent companions arrived that morning, each peddler glaring at his competitor despite the people clamoring for his own goods. Ravinda also had an inn under construction, the second floor already building, the result of Mistress Sahera receiving the bounty. She intended to call it the White Tower.
