Drawing a deep breath, he knelt beside the tent flap. “Aviendha?” He could not go in. A lamp was lit in there, and she could be sitting there naked for all he knew, mentally ripping him up and down the way he deserved. “Aviendha, I am sorry. I apologize. I was a fool to speak as I did without asking why. I should know that you wouldn’t harm me, and I . . . I . . . I’m a fool,” he finished weakly.
“A great deal you know, Rand al’Thor,” came a muffled reply. “You are a fool!”
How did Aiel apologize? He had never asked her that. Considering ji’e’toh, teaching men to sing, and wedding customs, he did not think he would. “Yes, I am. And I apologize.” There was no answer this time. “Are you in your blankets?” Silence.
Muttering to himself, he stood, working his stockinged toes on the icy ground. He was going to have to remain out here until he was sure she was decently covered. Without boots or coat. He seized hold of saidin, taint and all, just to be distanced from the bone-grinding cold, inside the Void.
The three Wise One dreamwalkers came running, of course, and Egwene, all staring at the burning Draghkar as they skirted it, drawing their shawls around them with almost the same motion.
“Only one,” Amys said. “I thank the Light, but I am surprised.”
“There were two,” Rand told her. “I . . . destroyed the other.” Why should he be hesitant just because Moiraine had warned him against bale-fire? It was a weapon like any other. “If Aviendha had not killed this one, it might have gotten me.”
“The feel of her channeling drew us,” Egwene said, looking him up and down. At first he thought she was checking for injuries, but she paid special attention to his stockinged feet, then glanced at the tent, where a crack in the tent flap showed lamplight. “You’ve upset her again, haven’t you? She saved your life, and you . . . Men!” With a disgusted shake of her head, she brushed past him and into the tent. He heard faint voices, but could not make out what was being said.
Melaine gave a hitch to her shawl. “If you do not need us, then we must see what is happening below.” She hurried off without waiting for the other two.
Bair cackled as she and Amys followed. “A wager on who she will check on first? My amethyst necklace that you like so much against that sapphire bracelet of yours?”
“Done. I choose Dorindha.”
The older Wise One cackled again. “Her eyes are still full of Bael. A first-sister is a first-sister, but a new husband . . .”
They moved on out of earshot, and he bent toward the tent flap. He still could not hear what they were saying, not unless he stuck his ear to the crack, and he was not about to do that. Surely Aviendha had covered herself with Egwene in there. Then again, the way Egwene had taken to Aiel ways, it was just as likely she had peeled out of her clothes instead.
The soft sound of slippers announced Moiraine and Lan, and Rand straightened. Though he could hear both of them breathing, the Warder’s steps still made barely an audible noise. Moiraine’s hair hung about her face, and she held a dark robe around her, the silk shining with the moon. Lan was fully dressed, booted and armed, wrapped in that cloak that made him part of the night. Of course. The clamor of fighting was dying down in the hills below.
“I am surprised you were not here sooner, Moiraine.” His voice sounded cold, but better his voice than him. He held onto saidin, fought it, and the night’s icy chill remained something far off. He was aware of it, aware of each hair on his arms stirring with cold beneath his shirtsleeves, but it did not touch him. “You usually come looking for me as soon as you sense trouble.”
“I have never explained all that I do or do not do.” Her voice was as coolly mysterious as it had ever been, yet even in the moonlight Rand was certain that she was blushing. Lan looked troubled, though with him it was difficult to tell. “I cannot hold your hand forever. Eventually, you must walk alone.”
“I did that tonight, didn’t I?” Embarrassment slid across the Void—that sounded as though he had done everything himself—and he added, “Aviendha all but took that one off my back.” The flames on the Draghkar were burning low.
“As well she was here, then,” Moiraine said calmly. “You did not need me.”
She had not been afraid, of that he was sure. He had seen her rush into the midst of Shadowspawn, wielding the Power as skillfully as Lan did his sword, seen it too often to believe fear in her. So why had she not come when she sensed the Draghkar? She could have, and Lan as well; that was one of the gifts a Warder received from the bond between him and an Aes Sedai. He could make her tell, catch her between her oath to him and her inability to lie straight out. No, he could not. Or would not. He would not do that to someone who was trying to help him.
“At least now we know what the attack below was about,” he said. “To make me think something important was happening there while the Draghkar slipped in on me. They tried that at Cold Rocks Hold, and it did not work there either.” Only, maybe it almost had, this time. If that had been the intent. “You would think they would try something different.” Couladin ahead of him; the Forsaken everywhere, it seemed. Why could he not face one enemy at a time?
“Do not make the mistake of thinking the Forsaken simple,” Moiraine said. “That could easily be fatal.” She shifted her robe as though wishing it were thicker. “The hour is late. If you have no further need of me . . . ?”
Aiel began to drift back as she and the Warder left. Some exclaimed over the Draghkar, and roused some of the gai’shain to drag it away, but most simply looked at it before going to their tents. They seemed to expect such things of him now.
When Adelin and the Maidens appeared, their soft-booted feet dragged. They stared at the Draghkar being hauled away by white-robed men, and exchanged long looks before approaching Rand.
“There was nothing here,” Adelin said slowly. “The attack was all below, Darkfriends and Trollocs.”
“Shouting ‘Sammael and the Golden Bees,’ I heard,” another added. With her head wrapped in a shoufa, Rand could not make out who she was. She sounded young; some of the Maidens were no more than sixteen.
Taking a deep breath, Adelin held out one of her spears, horizontally, in front of him, rock-steady. The others did the same, one spear each. “We—I—failed,” Adelin said. “We should have been here when the Draghkar came. Instead we ran like children to dance the spears.”
“What am I supposed to do with those?” Rand asked, and Adelin replied without hesitation.
“Whatever you wish, Car’a’carn. We stand ready, and will not resist.”
Rand shook his head. Bloody Aiel and their bloody ji’e’toh. “You take those and go back to guarding my tent. Well? Go.” Looks passed between them before they began to obey, as reluctantly as they had approached him in the first place. “And one of you tell Aviendha that I will be coming in when I return,” he added. He was not going to spend the entire night outside wondering whether it was safe. He stalked away, the stony ground hard under his feet.
Asmodean’s tent was not very far from his. There had not been a sound out of it. He whipped open the flap and ducked in. Asmodean was sitting in the dark, chewing his lip. He flinched when Rand appeared, and gave him no chance to speak.
“You did not expect me to take a hand, did you? I felt the Draghkar, but you could deal with those; you did. I have never liked Draghkar; we should never have made them. They have fewer brains than a Trolloc. Give them an order, and they still sometimes kill whatever is closest. If I had come out, if I had done something. . . . What if someone noticed? What if they realized it could not be you channeling? I—”
“Well for you that you didn’t,” Rand cut him off, sitting cross-legged in the dark. “If I had felt you full of saidin out there tonight, I might have killed you.”
The other man’s laugh was shaky. “I thought of that, too.”
“It was Sammael who sent the attack tonight. The Trollocs and Darkfriends, anyway.”
“It is not like Sammael to throw men a
way,” Asmodean said slowly. “But he’ll see ten thousand dead, or ten times that, if it gains him what he thinks is worth the cost. Maybe one of the others wants you to think it was him. Even if the Aiel took prisoners . . . Trollocs do not think of much besides killing, and Darkfriends believe what they are told.”
“It was him. He tried to bait me into attacking him once in the same way, at Serendahar.” Oh, Light! The thought drifted across the surface of the Void. I said “me.” He did not know where Serendahar had been, or anything but what he had said. The words had just come out.
After a long silence, Asmodean said quietly, “I never knew that.”
“What I want to know is, why?” Rand chose his words carefully, hoping that they were all his. He remembered Sammael’s face, a man—Not mine. Not my memory—a compact man with a short yellow beard. Asmodean had described all the Forsaken, but he knew this image was not made from that description. Sammael had always wanted to be taller, and resented it that the Power could not make him so. Asmodean had never told him that. “From what you’ve told me, he is not likely to want to face me unless he is sure of victory, and maybe not then. You said he’d likely leave me to the Dark One, if he could. So why is he sure he’ll win now, if I decide to go after him?”
They discussed it in the dark for hours without coming to any conclusion. Asmodean held to the opinion that it had been one of the others, hoping to send Rand against Sammael and thus get rid of one or both; at least, Asmodean said that he did. Rand could feel the man’s dark eyes on him, wondering. That slip had been too big to cover.
When he finally returned to his own tent, Adelin and the dozen Maidens all sprang to their feet, all of them at once telling him that Egwene was gone and Aviendha long asleep, that she was angry with him, they both were. They gave so many different pieces of advice on handling the two women’s anger, all at the same time, that he could understand none of it. Finally they fell silent, looks passing between them, and Adelin spoke alone.
“We must speak of tonight. Of what we did, and what we failed to do. We—”
“It was nothing,” he told her, “and if it was something, it’s forgiven and forgotten. I would like to have a few hours’ sleep for once. If you want to discuss it go talk to Amys or Bair. I am sure they’ll understand what you’re after more than I do.” That shut them up, surprisingly, and let him get inside.
Aviendha was in her blankets, with one slim, bare leg sticking out. He tried not to look at it, or her. She had left a lamp lit. He climbed into his own blankets gratefully and channeled the lamp out before releasing saidin. This time he dreamed of Aviendha hurling fire, only she was not hurling it at a Draghkar, and Sammael was sitting at her side, laughing.
CHAPTER
23
“The Fifth, I Give You”
Reining Mist around on a grassy hilltop, Egwene watched the streams of Aiel coming down from the Jangai Pass. The saddle had pushed her skirts above her knees again, but she hardly noticed that now. She could not spend every minute fussing with them. And she had on stockings; it was not as though she were bare-legged.
In trotting columns the Aiel flowed by below her, arranged by clan and sept and society. Thousands upon thousands, with their pack horses and mules, the gai’shain who would tend the camps while the rest fought, spreading a mile wide, and more still in the pass or already out of sight ahead. Even without families, it seemed a nation on the march. The Silk Path had been a road here, a full fifty paces wide and paved with broad white stones, slicing straight through hills carved to make a level. Only occasionally was it visible through the mass of Aiel, although they seemed to prefer running on the grass, but many of the paving stones had lifted up at a corner or sunk down at one end. More than twenty years had gone by since this road had carried more than local farmers’ carts and a handful of wagons.
It was startling to see trees again, real trees, towering oaks and leatherleaf in actual thickets rather than an occasional wind-twisted, stunted shape, and tall grass waving in the breeze across the hills. There was real forest to the north, and clouds in the sky, thin and high, yet clouds. The air seemed blessedly cool after the Waste, and moist, though brown leaves and large brown swaths through the grass told her that in reality it might be hotter and drier than usual for the time of year. Still, the countryside of Cairhien was a lush paradise compared to the other side of the Dragonwall.
A small stream meandered north beneath a nearly flat bridge, bordered by the dried clay of a broader bed; the River Gaelin lay not too many miles away in that direction. She wondered what the Aiel would make of that river; she had seen Aiel near a river once before. The shrunken band of water marked a definite break in the steady flow of people, as men and Maidens paused to stare in amazement before leaping across.
Kadere’s wagons rumbled by on the road, the long mule teams working hard, but still losing ground to the Aiel. It had taken four days to traverse the twists and turns of the pass, and Rand apparently intended to go as far into Cairhien as he could in the few hours of daylight remaining. Moiraine and Lan rode with the wagons; not ahead of them, or even with Kadere’s boxlike little white house on wheels, but alongside the second wagon, where the canvas-covered shape of the doorframe ter’angreal made a hump above the rest of the load. Some of the load was wrapped carefully or packed in boxes or barrels that Kadere had brought into the Waste full of his goods, and some was simply stuck in wherever it would fit, odd shapes of metal and glass, a red crystal chair, two child-sized statues of a nude man and woman, rods of bone and ivory and strange black materials in varying lengths and thicknesses. All sorts of things, including some Egwene could hardly begin to describe. Moiraine had used every inch of space in all of the wagons.
Egwene wished that she knew why the Aes Sedai was so concerned with that particular wagon; perhaps no one else had noticed that Moiraine paid it more attention than all the others combined, but she had. Not that she was likely to find out any time soon. Her newfound equality with Moiraine was a tender thing, as she had learned when she asked that question, in the heart of the pass, and was told that her imagination was too vivid and if she had time to spy on the Aes Sedai, perhaps Moiraine should speak to the Wise Ones about intensifying her training. She had apologized profusely, of course, and the soft words seemed to have worked. Amys and the others were not taking any more of her nights than they had before.
A hundred or so Taardad Far Dareis Mai went trotting by on her side of the road, moving easily, veils hanging but ready to be donned, full quivers at hips. Some carried their curved horn bows, arrows nocked, while others had their bows cased on their backs, spears and bucklers swinging rhythmically as they ran. At their rear a dozen gai’shain in their white robes leading pack mules struggled to keep up. One wore black, not white; Isendre labored hardest of all. Egwene could pick Adelin out, and two or three others who had been guarding Rand’s tent the night of the attack. Each clutched a doll in addition to her weapons, a rough-made doll clothed in full skirts and white blouse; they looked even more stone-faced than usual, trying to pretend that they held no such thing.
She was not sure what that was about. The Maidens who stood that guard had come in a group to see Bair and Amys when their stint was done, and had spent a long time with them. The next morning, while camp was still breaking in the grayness before dawn, they had begun making those dolls. She had not been able to ask, of course, but she had commented on it to one, a red-haired Tomanelle of the Serai sept named Maira, and the woman said it was to remind her that she was not a child. Her tone made it clear that she did not want to talk. One of the Maidens carrying a doll was no more than sixteen, yet Maira was at least as old as Adelin. It made little sense, and that was frustrating. Every time Egwene thought she understood Aiel ways, something demonstrated that she did not.
Despite herself, her eyes were drawn back to the mouth of the pass. The row of stakes was still there, just visible, stretching from steep mountain slope to steep mountain slope except where Aiel
had kicked some of them down. Couladin had left another message, men and women impaled across their path, standing there seven days dead. The tall gray walls of Selean clung to the hills at the right of the pass, nothing showing above them. Moiraine said it had held only a shadow of its one-time glory, yet it had still been a considerable town, much larger than Taien; no more remained of it, however. No survivors, either—except whoever the Shaido had carried off—although here some had probably run for places they thought safe. There had been farms on these hills; most of eastern Cairhien had been abandoned after the Aiel War, but a town needed farms for food. Now soot-streaked chimneys thrust up from blackened stone farm house walls; here a few charred rafters remained above a stone barn, there barn and farm house had collapsed from the heat. The hill where she sat Mist’s saddle had been sheep pasture; near the fence at the foot of the hill, flies still buzzed over the refuse of butchering. Not an animal remained in any pasture, not a chicken scratching in a barnyard. The crop fields were burned stubble.
Couladin and the Shaido were Aiel. But so were Aviendha, and Bair and Amys and Melaine, and Rhuarc, who said she reminded him of one of his daughters. They had been disgusted at the impalements, yet even they seemed to think it little more than the treekillers deserved. Perhaps the only way to truly know the Aiel was to be born Aiel.
Casting a last glance at the destroyed town, she rode slowly down to the rough stone fence and let herself out at the gate, leaning down to refasten the rawhide thong out of habit. The irony was that Moiraine had said that Selean might actually go over to Couladin. In the shifting currents of Daes Dae’mar, in balancing an Aiel invader against a man who had sent Tairens into Cairhien, for whatever reason, the decision could have tipped either way, had Couladin given them a chance to choose.
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