“There is no set formality,” Rhuarc said. “How could there be, for a thing that will happen only once? When there must be a meeting between clan chiefs, there are places where something like the Peace of Rhuidean holds. The closest to Cold Rocks, the closest to Rhuidean, is Alcair Dal. You could show proofs to the clan and sept chiefs there.”
“Al’cair Dal?” Mat said, giving it a subtly different sound. “The Golden Bowl?”
Rhuarc nodded. “A round canyon, though there is nothing golden about it. There is a ledge at one end, and a man who stands there can be heard by anyone in the canyon without raising his voice.”
Rand frowned at the Dragons on his forearms. He was not the only one to have been marked in some way in Rhuidean. Mat no longer spoke a few words of the Old Tongue now and then without knowing what he was saying. He understood, since Rhuidean, though he did not appear to realize it. Egwene was watching Mat. Thoughtfully. She had spent too much time with Aes Sedai.
“Rhuarc, can you send messengers out to the clan chiefs?” he said. “How long will it take to ask them all to Alcair Dal? What will it take to make sure they come?”
“Messengers will take weeks, and more weeks for everyone to gather.” Rhuarc’s gesture took in all four Wise Ones. “They can speak to every clan chief in his dreams in one night, to every sept chief. And every Wise One, to make sure no man takes it for just a dream.”
“I appreciate your confidence that we can move mountains, shade of my heart,” Amys said wryly, settling herself beside Rand with her ointment, “but that does not make it so. It would take several nights to do what you suggest, with little rest in them.”
Rand caught her hand as she started to rub the sharp-smelling mixture on his cheek. “Will you do it?”
“Are you so eager to destroy us?” she demanded, then bit her lip vexedly as the white-cowled woman on Rand’s other side started.
Melaine clapped her hands twice. “Leave us,” she said sharply, and the women in white bowed their way out with their basins and cloths.
“You goad me like a needleburr next to the skin,” Amys told Rand bitterly. “Whatever they are told, those women will talk now of what they should not know.” She pulled her hand free, began rubbing in the ointment with perhaps more energy than was necessary. It stung worse than it smelled.
“I do not mean to goad you,” Rand said, “but there is no time. The Forsaken are loose, Amys, and if they find out where I am, or what I plan … .” The Aiel women did not seem surprised. Had they known already? “Nine still live. Too many, and those that don’t want to kill me think they can use me. I have no time. If I knew a way to bring all the clan chiefs here now, and make them accept me, I’d use it.”
“What is it you plan?” Amys voice was as stony as her face.
“Will you ask���tell—the chiefs to come to Alcair Dal?”
For a long moment she met his stare. When she finally nodded, it was grudging.
Begrudged or not, some of the tension went out of him. There was no way to win back seven lost days, but perhaps he could avoid losing more. Moiraine, still in Rhuidean with Aviendha, held him here yet, though. He could not simply abandon her.
“You knew my mother,” he said. Egwene leaned forward, as intent as he, and Mat shook his head.
Amys’s hand paused on his face. “I knew her.”
“Tell me about her. Please.”
She shifted her attention to the slash above his ear; if a frown could have Healed, he would not have needed her ointment. Finally she said, “Shaiel’s story, as I know it, begins when I was still Far Dareis Mai, more than a year before I gave up the spear. A number of us had ranged almost to the Dragonwall together. One day we saw a woman, a golden-haired young wetlander, in silks, with packhorses and a fine mare to ride. A man we would have killed, of course, but she had no weapon beyond a simple knife at her belt. Some wanted to run her back to the Dragonwall naked …” Egwene blinked; she seemed continually surprised at how hard the Aiel were. Amys continued without pause. “ … yet she seemed to be searching determinedly for something. Curious, we followed, day by day, without letting her see. Her horses died, her food ran out, her water, but she did not turn back. She stumbled on afoot, until finally she fell and could not rise. We decided to give her water, and ask her story. She was near death, and it was a full day before she could speak.”
“Her name was Shaiel?” Rand said when she hesitated. “Where was she from? Why did she come here?”
“Shaiel,” Bair said, “was the name she took for herself. She never gave another in the time I knew her. In the Old Tongue it would mean the Woman Who Is Dedicated.” Mat nodded agreement, not seeming to realize what he had done; Lan eyed him thoughtfully over a silver cup of water. “There was a bitterness in Shaiel, in the beginning,” she finished.
Sitting back on her heels beside Rand, Amys nodded. “She spoke of a child abandoned, a son she loved. A husband she did not love. Where, she would not say. I do not think she ever forgave herself for leaving the child. She would tell little beyond what she had to. It was for us she had been searching, for Maidens of the Spear. An Aes Sedai called Gitara Moroso, who had the Foretelling, had told her that disaster would befall her land and her people, perhaps the world, unless she went to dwell among the Maidens of the Spear, telling no one of her going. She must become a Maiden, and she could not return to her own land until the Maidens had gone to Tar Valon.
She shook her head wonderingly. “You must understand how it sounded, then. The Maidens go to Tar Valon? No Aiel had crossed the Dragonwall since the day we first reached the Three-fold Land. It would be another four years before Laman’s crime brought us into the wetlands. And certainly no one not Aiel had ever become a Maiden of the Spear. Some of us thought her mad from the sun. But she had a stubborn will, and somehow we found ourselves agreeing to let her try.”
Gitara Moroso. An Aes Sedai with the Foretelling. Somewhere he had heard that name, but where? And he had a brother. A half-brother. Growing up, he had wondered what it would be like to have a brother or a sister. Who, and where? But Amys was going on.
“Almost every girl dreams of becoming a Maiden, and learns at least the rudiments of bow and spear, of fighting with hands and feet. Even so, those who take the final step and wed the spear discover they know nothing. It was harder for Shaiel. The bow she knew well, but she had never run as far as a mile, or lived on what she could find. A ten-year-old girl could beat her, and she did not even know what plants indicate water. Yet she persevered. In a year she had spoken her vows to the spear, become a Maiden, adopted into the Chumai sept of the Taardad.”
And eventually she had gone to Tar Valon with the Maidens, to die on the slopes of Dragonmount. Half an answer, and leaving new questions. If he could only have seen her face.
“You have something of her in your features,” Seana said as though reading his thoughts. She had settled herself cross-legged with a small silver cup of wine. “Less of Janduin.”
“Janduin? My father?”
“Yes,” Seana said. “He was clan chief of the Taardad, then, the youngest in memory. Yet he had a way to him, a power. People listened to him, and would follow him, even those not of his clan. He ended the blood feud between Taardad and Nakai after two hundred years, and made alliance not only with the Nakai, but the Reyn, and the Reyn were not far short of blood feud. He very nearly ended the feud between Shaarad and Goshien, as well, and might have had Laman not cut down the Tree. Young as he was, it was he who led the Taardad and Nakai, the Reyn and Shaarad, to seek Laman’s bloodprice.”
Was. So he was dead now, too. Egwene wore sympathy on her face. Rand ignored it; he did not want sympathy. How could he feel loss, for people he had never known? Yet he did. “How did Janduin die?”
The Wise Ones exchanged hesitant glances. At last Amys said, “It was the beginning of the third year of the search for Laman when Shaiel found herself with child. By the laws, she should have returned to the Three-fold Land. A Ma
iden is forbidden to carry the spear while she carries a child. But Janduin could forbid her nothing; had she asked the moon on a necklace, he would have tried to give it to her. So she stayed, and in the last fight, before Tar Valon, she was lost, and the child was lost. Janduin could not forgive himself for not making her obey the law.”
“He gave up his place as clan chief,” Bair said. “No one had ever done that before. He was told it could not be done, but he simply walked away. He went north with the young men, to hunt Trollocs and Myrddraal in the Blight. It is a thing wild young men do, and Maidens with less sense than goats. Those who returned said he was killed by a man, though. They said Janduin claimed this man looked like Shaiel, and he would not raise his spear when the man ran him through.”
Dead, then. Both dead. He would never lose his love for Tam, never stop thinking of him as father, but he wished he could have seen Janduin and Shaiel, just once.
Egwene tried to comfort him, of course, the way women did. There was no use trying to make her understand that what he had lost was something he had never had. For memories of parents he had Tam al’Thor’s quiet laugh, and dimmer remembrance of Kari al’Thor’s gentle hands. That was as much as any man could want or need. She seemed disappointed, even a little upset with him, and the Wise Ones appeared to share the feeling to one degree or another, from Bair’s openly disapproving frown to Melaine’s sniff and ostentatious shifting of her shawl. Women never understood. Rhuarc and Lan and Mat did; they left him alone, as he wanted.
For some reason he did not feel like eating when Melaine had food brought, so he went to lie at the edge of the tent, with one of the cushions under his elbow, where he could watch the slope, and the fog-shrouded city. The sun blasted the valley and the surrounding mountains, burning the shadows. The air that eddied into the tent seemed to come from an open oven.
After a time Mat came over, wearing a clean shirt. He sat beside Rand without speaking, peering into the valley below, the strange spear propped on his knee. Now and again he felt at the cursive script carved into the black haft.
“How is your head?” Rand asked, and Mat jumped.
“It … doesn’t hurt anymore.” He jerked his fingers away from the carving, folded his hands deliberately in his lap. “Not as much, anyway. Whatever that was they mixed up, it did the trick.”
He fell silent again, and Rand let him. He did not want to talk, either. He could almost feel time passing, grains of sand in an hourglass dropping one by one, ever so slowly. But everything seemed to tremble, too, the sands ready to explode in a torrent. Foolish. He was just being affected by the shimmering heat haze rising from the mountain’s bare rock. The clan chiefs could not reach Alcair Dal one day sooner if Moiraine appeared before him that instant. They were only a part anyway, and maybe the least important part. A little while later he noticed Lan squatting easily atop the same granite outcrop Couladin had used, paying no mind to the sun. The Warder was watching the valley, too. Another man who did not want to talk.
Rand refused a midday meal, too, though Egwene and the Wise Ones took turns trying to make him eat. They seemed to take his refusal calmly enough, but when he suggested returning to Rhuidean to look for Moiraine—and Aviendha, for that matter—Melaine exploded.
“You fool man! No man can go twice to Rhuidean. Even you would not come back alive! Oh, starve if you want to!” She threw half a round loaf of bread at his head. Mat caught it out of the air and calmly began eating.
“Why do you want me to live?” Rand asked her. “You know what that Aes Sedai said in front of Rhuidean. I will destroy you. Why aren’t you plotting with Couladin to kill me?” Mat choked, and Egwene planted her fists on her hips, ready to lecture, but Rand kept his attention on Melaine. Instead of answering, she glared at him and left the tent.
It was Bair who spoke. “Everyone thinks they know the Prophecy of Rhuidean, but what they know is what Wise Ones and clan chiefs have told them for generations. Not lies, but not the whole truth. The truth might break the strongest man.”
“What is the whole truth?” Rand insisted.
She glanced at Mat, then said, “In this case, the whole truth, the truth known only to Wise Ones and clan chiefs before this, is that you are our doom. Our doom, and our salvation. Without you, no one of our people will live beyond the Last Battle. Perhaps not even until the Last Battle. That is prophecy, and truth. With you … . ‘He shall spill out the blood of those who call themselves Aiel as water on sand, and he shall break them as dried twigs, yet the remnant of a remnant shall he save, and they shall live.’ A hard prophecy, but this has never been a gentle land.” She met his gaze without flinching. A hard land, and a hard woman.
He rolled back over and returned to watching the valley. The others left, except for Mat.
In the midafternoon he finally spotted a figure climbing the mountain, scrambling up wearily. Aviendha. Mat had been right; she was bare as she was born. And showing some effects of the sun, too, Aiel or not; it was only her hands and face that were sun-darkened, and the rest of her looked decidedly red. He was glad to see her. She disliked him, but only because she thought he had mistreated Elayne. The simplest of motives. Not for prophecy or doom, not for the Dragons on his arms or because he was the Dragon Reborn. For a simple human reason. He almost looked forward to those cool, challenging stares.
When she saw him, she froze, and there was nothing cool in her blue-green eyes. Her gaze made the sun seem cold; he should have been burned to ash on the spot.
“Uh … Rand?” Mat said quietly. “I don’t think I would turn my back on her if I were you.”
A tired sigh escaped him. Of course. If she had been into those glass columns, she knew. Bair, Melaine, the others—they had all had years to grow used to it. For Aviendha, it was a fresh wound with no scab. No wonder she hates me now.
The Wise Ones scurried out to meet Aviendha, hurrying her away into another tent. The next time Rand saw her she wore a bulky brown skirt and loose white blouse, with a shawl looped around her arms. She did not look very happy about the clothes. She saw him watching, and the fury on her face—the sheer animal rage—was enough to make him turn away.
Shadows were beginning to stretch to the far mountains by the time Moiraine appeared, falling and staggering back to her feet as she climbed, as sunburned as Aviendha. He was startled to see she had no clothes on either. Women were crazy, that was all.
Lan leaped from the stone outcrop and ran down to her. Scooping her into his arms, he ran back upslope, perhaps faster than he had descended, cursing and shouting for the Wise Ones by turns. Moiraine’s head lolled on his shoulder. The Wise Ones came out to take her, Melaine physically barring his way when he tried to follow them into the tent. Lan was left stalking up and down outside, pounding a fist into his hand.
Rand rolled onto his back and stared up at the low tent roof. Three days saved. He should have felt glad Moiraine and Aviendha were back and safe, but his relief was all for days saved. Time was everything. He had to be able to choose his own ground. Maybe he still could.
“What are you going to do now?” Mat asked.
“Something you should like. I am going to break the rules.”
“I meant are you going to get something to eat? Me, I’m hungry.”
In spite of himself, Rand laughed. Something to eat? He did not care if he ever ate again. Mat stared at him as if he were crazy, and that only made him laugh harder. Not crazy. For the first time somebody was going to learn what it meant that he was the Dragon Reborn. He was going to break the rules in a way no one expected.
CHAPTER 35
Sharp Lessons
The Heart of the Stone in Tel��aran’rhiod was as Egwene remembered it in the real world, huge polished redstone columns rising to a distant ceiling, and, beneath the great central dome, Callandor driven into the pale floorstones. Only people were missing. The golden lamps were not lit, yet there was a sort of light, somehow dim and sharp at the same time, that seemed to come from every
where at once, or nowhere. It was often like that, indoors in Tel’aran’rhiod.
What she did not expect was the woman standing beyond the glittering crystal sword and peering off into the pallid shadows among the columns. The way she was dressed startled Egwene. Bare feet, and wide trousers of brocaded yellow silk. Above a darker yellow sash, she was quite bare except for golden chains hanging around her neck. Tiny gold rings decorated her ears in sparkling rows, and most startling of all, another pierced her nose, with a thin, medallion-lined chain running from nose ring to one of the rings in her left ear.
“Elayne?” Egwene gasped, gathering her shawl around her as though she were the one with no blouse. She had garbed herself as a Wise One, this time, for no particular reason.
The Daughter-Heir leaped, and when she came down facing Egwene she was wearing a demure gown of pale green with a high, embroidered neck and long sleeves that dangled points over her hands. No earrings. No nose ring. “It is how the Sea Folk women dress at sea,” she said hurriedly, with a furious blush. “I wanted to see how it felt, and this seemed the best place. I couldn’t do it on the ship, after all.”
“How does it feel?” Egwene asked curiously.
“Cold, actually.” Elayne looked around at the surrounding columns. “And it makes you feel people are staring at you, even when there’s no one there.” Abruptly she laughed. “Poor Thom and Juilin. They do not know where to look most of the time. Half the crew are women.”
Studying the columns herself, Egwene shrugged uncomfortably. It did feel as if they were being watched. No doubt it was just because they were the only people in the Stone. No one who had access to Tel’aran’rhiod could expect to find anyone to watch, here. “Thom? Thom Merrilin? And Juilin Sandar? Are they with you?”
“Oh, Egwene, Rand sent them. Rand and Lan. Well, Moiraine sent Thom, actually, but Rand sent Master Sandar. To help us. Nynaeve is quite set up about it, about Lan, though of course she won’t let on.”
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