Weaves of the Power
The men sitting around the table in the common room of The Wandering Woman were mainly local. Those who wore the long vest sported it in bright silk, often brocaded, over pale shirts with wide sleeves. Garnets or pearls adorned finger rings, hoop earrings were gold not gilded, and moonstones and sapphires sparkled on the pommels of curved knives stuck through belts. Several men had silk coats slung about their shoulders, with a chain of silver or gold strung between the narrow lapels embroidered with flowers or animals. The coats looked odd, really — too small to put on; never meant for anything but a cape — but their wearers carried long narrow swords as well as the curved dagger, and seemed equally willing to use either, for a wrong word, a wrong look, or because they happened to feel like it.
It was a varied crowd, altogether. Two Murandian merchants with curled mustaches and those ridiculous little beards on the point of the chin, and a Domani with hair below his shoulders and thin mustaches who wore a gold bracelet, a close-fitting gold necklace, and a large pearl in his left ear. A dark Atha’an Miere in a bright green coat, with tattooed hands and two knives thrust into a red sash, and a Taraboner with a transparent veil covering thick mustaches that almost hid his mouth, and a number of outlanders who might have been from anywhere. But every man had a pile of coins in front of him, though the size did vary. So close to the Tarasin Palace, The Wandering Woman attracted patrons with gold to spare.
Rattling the five dice in the leather cup, Mat spun them out on the table. They stopped with two crowns, two stars and a cup showing. A fair toss; no better. His luck ran in waves, and at the moment the wave seemed low, meaning he won no more than half his tosses at most. So far he had managed to lose ten in a row, an unusual run for him at any time. The dice passed to a blue-eyed outlander, a hard, narrow-faced man who seemed to have plenty of coin to fling about despite his plain brown coat.
Vanin bent to whisper in Mat’s ear. "They’re out again. Thom says he still doesn’t know how." Mat directed a grimace at the fat man that made him straighten more quickly that you would think someone his size could.
Swallowing half the dewmelon punch in his silver cup, Mat frowned down the table. Again! The blue-eyed man’s toss rolled across the table, and the dice stopped showing three crowns, a rose and a rod. Murmurs rounded the table at his win.
"Blood and ashes," Mat muttered. "Next, the Daughter of the Nine Moons is going to walk in and claim me." The blue-eyed fellow choked on his celebratory drink. "Do you know the name?" Mat asked.
"My punch went down the wrong way," the man said in a soft, slurring accent Mat did not recognize. "What name was that?"
Mat made a pacifying gesture; he had seen fights start over less. Scraping his gold and silver back into his purse, he stuffed it into his coat pocket as he rose. "I am done. The Light’s blessing on all here." Everyone at the table repeated the benison, even the outlanders. People were very polite in Ebou Dar.
Even short of midmorning, the common room was fairly full, and another dice game added its share of laughter and groans. Two of Mistress Anan’s younger sons were helping the serving girls hand out late breakfasts. The innkeeper herself was sitting at the back of the room near the railless white stone stairs, keeping an eye on everything, with a young, pretty woman whose big black eyes had a merry twinkle, as though she knew a joke no one else did. Her face was a perfect oval framed by glossy black hair, and the deep neckline of her red-belted gray dress showed a tantalizing view. The amusement in her eyes deepened as she smiled at Mat.
"With your luck, Lord Cauthon," Mistress Anan said, "my husband should ask you where to send his fishing boats." For some reason, her tone was very dry.
Mat accepted the title without a blink. In Ebou Dar, few would challenge a lord except other lords; it was a simple calculation of numbers to him. There were a lot fewer lords than commoners, which meant fewer chances somebody would try to stick a knife in him. Even so, he had had to crack three heads in the last ten days. "I’m afraid my luck doesn’t run to things like that, Mistress."
Olver seemed to just pop up at his side. "Can we go horse-racing, Mat?" he demanded eagerly.
Frielle, Mistress Anan’s middle daughter, trotted up to catch the boy by the shoulders. "Your pardon, Lord Cauthon," she said anxiously. "He just slipped away from me. Light’s truth, he did." Soon to be married — the snug silver necklace for her marriage knife already encircled her slim throat — she had volunteered to look after Olver, laughing about how she wanted six sons of her own. Mat suspected she was beginning to hope for daughters.
It was Nalesean, coming down the stairs, who got Mat’s glare, hard enough to stop the Tairen in his tracks. It was Nalesean who had entered Wind in two races, with Olver riding — boys did the riding here — and Mat not knowing a thing till it was done. That Wind had proven as fast as his name did not help matters. Two victories gave Olver a taste for more. "Not your fault, Mistress," Mat told Frielle. "Put him in a barrel if you must, with my blessing."
Olver gave him an accusatory look, but a moment later he whipped around to give Frielle an insolent grin he had picked up somewhere. It looked odd with his big ears and wide mouth; he was never going to be a handsome lad. "I will sit quietly if I can look at your eyes. You have beautiful eyes."
Frielle had a lot of her mother in her, and not just her looks. She laughed sweetly and chucked him under the chin, making him blush. Her mother and the big-eyed young woman smiled at the tabletop.
Shaking his head, Mat started up the stairs. He had to speak to the boy. He could not just grin like that at every woman he saw. And telling a woman she had beautiful eyes! At his age! Mat did not know where Olver got it.
As he came abreast of Nalesean, the man said, "They have sneaked away again, haven’t they." It was not a question, and when Mat nodded, he gave his pointed beard a yank and cursed. "I’ll assemble the men, Mat."
Nerim was fussing about Mat’s room, wiping the table with a cloth as if the maids had not dusted this morning already. He shared a smaller room next door with Olver, and rarely left The Wandering Woman. Ebou Dar was dissolute and uncivilized, he claimed.
"My Lord is going out?" Nerim said lugubriously as Mat picked up his hat. "In that coat? I fear there is a wine stain from last night on the shoulder. I would have removed it if my Lord had not donned the garment in haste this morning, and a gash in the sleeve — from a knife, I believe — that I would have mended."
Mat let him bring out a gray coat with silver scrolls embroidered on the cuffs and high collar and gave him the gold-embroidered green.
"I trust my Lord will at least try not to get blood on it today. Bloodstains are very difficult to remove."
It was a compromise they had worked out. Mat put up with Nerim’s dismal face and gloomy observations, and let the man fetch, clean and hand him things he could just as easily pick up himself; in return Nerim agreed, reluctantly, not to try actually dressing him.
Checking the knives snugged up his sleeves, under his coat and in the turned-down tops of his boots, Mat left his spear leaning in the corner with his unstrung bow and went down to the front of the inn. That spear seemed to draw idiots who wanted to fight the way honey drew flies.
In spite of his hat, sweat beaded on Mat’s face the moment he stepped from the shade and relative coolness of the inn. The morning sun would have done for high noon in midsummer in ordinary times, but Mol Hara Square was thronged with people. At first he stood frowning at the Tarasin Palace. With Juilin and Thom watching inside and Vanin out, how were they managing to leave without being seen? They went out almost every single day. After it happened three times, Mat had set men watching every way out of that domed heap of white stone and plaster, taking their places before dawn. There were just enough of them, with him and Nalesean. No one had seen hide nor hair, but just before midday Thom came out to say the women had gone somehow. The old gleeman seemed at his wits’ end, ready to tear out his mustaches. Mat knew what was going on. They were doing it just to spite
him.
Nalesean and the others were waiting in a glum sweating knot. Nalesean was fingering his sword hilt as though he would like an opportunity to use it today.
"We’ll look across the river today," Mat said. Several of the Redarms exchanged uneasy glances; they had heard the stories.
Vanin shifted his feet, shook his head. "A waste of time," he said flatly. "Lady Elayne would never go anywhere like that. The Aiel woman maybe, or Birgitte, but not Lady Elayne."
Mat closed his eyes for a moment. How had Elayne managed to ruin a good man in so short a time? He kept hoping that enough time away from her influence would set Vanin right, but he was beginning to lose hope. Light, but he despised noblewomen. "Well, if we don’t see them today, we can forget the Rahad — they’ll stand out like painted larks in a flock of blackbirds over there — but I intend to find them if they’re hiding under a bed in the Pit of Doom. Search in pairs, as usual, and watch each other’s back. Now to find some boatmen to ferry us across. Burn me, I hope they’re not all out selling fruit to the Sea Folk ships."
To Elayne the street looked as it had in Tel’aran’rhiod, brick buildings five and six stories high, covered patchily with flaking white plaster, crowded together and looming above uneven pavement. Only at this time of day, with the golden sun burning overhead, did shadows vanish completely from these narrow ways. Flies buzzed everywhere. The only differences from the World of Dreams were the laundry hanging from windows, the people — not many outdoors at the moment, of course — and the smell, a deep pungent miasma of decay that made her try not to breathe too deeply. Unfortunately, every street looked alike in the Rahad.
Halting Birgitte with a hand on her arm, she eyed a scabrous pile of brick with dingy washing dangling from half the windows. The thin wail of a baby crying came from somewhere inside. It had the right number of floors, six. She was certain it had been six. Nynaeve insisted on five.
"I don’t think we should stand staring," Birgitte said softly. "People are looking."
That was not quite true, just Birgitte worrying about her. Shirtless men in often ragged vests strutted down the street with sunlight glinting on their brass hoop earrings, and brass finger rings set with colored glass, or slunk along like the sort of cur dog that might snarl and might bite. For that matter, so did the women, in their usually worn dresses and their jewelry of brass and glass. Everyone had a curved knife stuck through a belt, and frequently a plain work knife as well.
In truth, no one gave her and Birgitte a second glance, though Birgitte’s aged face was often challenging and she herself was tall for an Ebou Dari woman. That was what they saw, by way of not so simple weaves of Air and Fire that Elayne had inverted and tied off herself. When Elayne looked at Birgitte, she saw a woman with fine wrinkles at the corners of black eyes and black hair touched with gray. The disguises were easier the closer you stayed to how a person really was, so the hair flowing down Birgitte’s back, tied in four places with tattered green ribbon, was considerably longer than Ebou Dari women wore it, but then Elayne had not cut her hair either, and no one seemed to pay it any mind. It was a perfect disguise; she just wished she did not have to sweat as well. With the addition of the even more complex weave of Spirit that masked a woman’s ability to channel, Elayne had walked right by Merilille on her way out of the palace that morning. She wore it still; they had seen Vandene and Adeleas on this side of the river more than once.
Their clothes were not part of the weaves, of course, but threadbare woolen dresses with frayed embroidery on the sleeves and around the deep narrow necklines. Their shifts and stockings were wool too, and Elayne’s, at least, itched. Tylin had provided the garments, along with various pieces of advice, and the white-sheathed marriage knives. It seemed that married women were less likely to be challenged than unmarried, and widows who rejected another marriage least of all. Age helped, too. No one challenged a gray-haired grandmother, though she might you.
"I think we should go in," Elayne said, and Birgitte moved ahead of her, one hand on the knife in her coarse brown woolen belt, to push open the unpainted door. Inside was a dim hallway lined with rough doors, and a steep narrow stairway of chipped brick at the back. Elayne did not quite sigh in relief.
White sheaths or no white sheaths, walking into a building where you did not belong was one good way to end up in a knife fight here. So was asking questions, or being curious. Tylin had counseled against that, but on the first day they had visited inns, marked only by blue doors, planning to say they were buying things out of old storerooms to refurbish and sell. She had paired with Birgitte and set Nynaeve with Aviendha so they could cover more ground. The common rooms were dark, grimy places, and twice in as many stops, Birgitte had hustled her out, both of them with daggers in hand, just before serious trouble started. The second time, Elayne had to channel briefly, tripping a pair of women who came after them into the street, and even so Birgitte had been certain that someone had followed them the rest of the day. Nynaeve and Aviendha had the same sort of difficulty, except for being followed; Nynaeve had actually hit another woman with a stool. So even innocuous questions were abandoned, and they hoped they did not walk through a doorway into a knife.
Birgitte climbed the steep stairs ahead, though she often glanced behind, too. The smells of cooking blended with the general stench of the Rahad in a quite sickening fashion. The baby stopped crying, but somewhere in the building a woman began shouting. On the third floor a thick-shouldered man without shirt or vest opened a door just as they came up. Birgitte frowned at him, and he raised both hands, palms toward them, and backed out of the hallway again, kicking the door shut as he did. On the top floor, where the storeroom should have been if this was the right building, a gaunt woman in a coarse linen shift was sitting on a stool in the doorway, catching what little breeze was stirring while she sharpened her dagger. Her head swiveled toward them, and the blade stopped moving across the honing stone. She did not look away from them as they backed slowly down the stairway, and the soft rasp of metal on stone did not begin again until they reached the bottom of the flight. Elayne did let out a relieved breath then.
She was more than glad Nynaeve had not taken her wager. Ten days. She had been an optimistic fool. This was the eleventh day since her boast, eleven days when sometimes she thought she was on the same street in the evening as the morning, eleven days without a clue to the bowl. Sometimes they had remained in the palace just to clear their heads. It was all so frustrating. At least Vandene and Adeleas were having no luck either. As far as Elayne could see, no one in the Rahad would speak two willing words to Aes Sedai. People melted away as soon as they realized what they were; she had seen two women try to stab Adeleas, no doubt to rob the fool walking the Rahad in a silk dress, and by the time the Brown sister lifted the pair on flows of Air and stuffed them through a window two floors up, there was not another person in sight. Well, she was not going to allow those two to find her bowl and snatch it from under her nose.
Once back in the street, she had yet another reminder that there were worse things in the Rahad than frustration. Right in front of her, a slender man with blood all over his chest and a knife in his hand came leaping out of a doorway, spinning immediately to face another man who followed; the second was taller and heavier and bleeding down the side of his face. They circled each other, eyes locked, extended blades flickering and probing. A small crowd gathered to watch as though springing from the rough pavement; none came running, but no one passed by.
Elayne and Birgitte moved to the side of the street, but they did not leave. In the Rahad, leaving would attract attention, the last thing they wanted. Blending in meant watching, but Elayne managed to focus beyond the two men, seeing only vague blurs of quick motion until suddenly the motion slowed. She blinked and made herself look. The man with blood on his chest was parading about, grinning and gesturing with a blade that dripped red. The bigger man lay facedown in the street, giving harsh feeble coughs, not twenty paces from her.
>
Elayne moved instinctively — her minuscule ability in Healing was better than none when a man was bleeding to death, and to the Pit of Doom with what anyone here thought of Aes Sedai — yet before she took a second step, another woman was kneeling at the man’s side. A little older than Nynaeve perhaps, she wore a red-belted blue dress in somewhat better repair than most in the Rahad. Elayne took her for the dying man’s sweetheart at first, especially when the victor in the duel grew sober. No one moved to go; everyone watched silently as the woman turned the man onto his back.
Elayne gave a start as, far from tenderly wiping the blood from his lips, the woman pulled what seemed to be a handful of herbs from her pouch and hurriedly thrust some of them into the man’s mouth. Before her hand left his face, the glow of saidar surrounded her, and she began to weave the flows of Healing more deftly than Elayne could have done. The man gasped hard enough to expel most of the leaves, shuddered — and lay still, half-open eyes staring at the sun.
"Too late, it seems." Standing, the woman faced the lean fellow. "You must tell Masic’s wife you’ve killed her husband, Baris."
"Yes, Asra," Baris replied meekly.
Asra turned away without another glance at either man, and the thin crowd opened up before her. As she passed within a few paces of Elayne and Birgitte, Elayne noticed two things about her. One was her strength; Elayne felt for that on purpose. She expected to feel a fair amount, but Asra likely would never have been allowed to take the test for Accepted. Healing must have been her strongest Talent — perhaps her only one, since she must be a wilder — and very well honed from use. Maybe she even believed those herbs were necessary. The second thing Elayne noticed was the woman’s face. It was not sun-dark, as she had supposed at first. Asra was most certainly Domani. What under the Light was a Domani wilder doing in the Rahad?
Elayne might have followed the woman, except that Birgitte drew her the other way. "I recognize that look in your eyes, Elayne." Birgitte’s eyes scanned the street as if she expected some of the passersby to be eavesdroppers. "I don’t know why you want to chase after that woman, but she seems to be respected. Accost her, and you might have more blades drawn than you and I can handle together."
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