“The Elders?” Rand asked patiently. You had to be patient with Loial, with any Ogier. They did not see time the way humans did - who among humans would think of whose turn it was after a thousand years? - and Loial tended to go on at length, given half a chance. Great length.
Loial’s ears twitched, and he gave Min another look, received another encouraging smile in return. “Well, as I said, I visited all the stedding but Shangtai. Karldin wouldn’t go inside. He’d rather sleep every night under a bush than be cut off from the Source for a minute.” Rand did not say a word, but Loial raised his hands from his knees, palms out. “I am getting to the point, Rand. I am. I did what I could, but I don’t know whether it was enough. The stedding in the Borderlands told me to go home and leave matters to older and wiser heads. So did Shadoon and Mardoon, in the mountains on the Shadow Coast. The other sledding agreed to guard the Way-gates. I don’t think they really believe there’s any danger, but they agreed, so you know they will keep a close guard. And I’m sure someone will take word to Shangtai. The Elders in Shangtai never liked having a Waygate right outside the stedding. I must have heard Elder Haman say a hundred times that it was dangerous. I know they’ll agree to have it watched.”
Rand nodded slowly. Ogier never lied, or at least the few who made the attempt were so poor at it that they seldom tried a second time. An Ogier’s word was taken as seriously as anyone else’s sworn oath. The Waygates would be guarded closely. Except for those in the Borderlands, and in the mountains south of Amadicia and Tarabon. From gate to gate, a man could journey from the Spine of the World to the Aryth Ocean, from the Borderlands to the Sea of Storms, all in a strange world somehow outside of time, or maybe alongside it. Two days walking along the Ways could carry you a hundred miles, or five hundred, depending on the paths you chose. And if you were willing to risk the dangers. You could die very easily in the Ways, or worse. The Ways had turned dark and corrupted long ago. Trollocs did not care about that, though, at least not when they had Myrddraal driving them. Trollocs cared only for killing, especially when they had Myrddraal driving them. And nine Waygates would remain unwatched, with the danger that any of them might open up to let out Trollocs by the tens of thousands. Setting any sort of guard without the stedding’s cooperation might be impossible. Many people did not believe Ogier existed, and few of those who did wanted to meddle without leave. Maybe the Asha’man, if he had enough he could trust.
Suddenly, he realized that he was not the only one who was tired. Loial looked worn and gaunt. His coat was rumpled and hung loosely on him. It was dangerous for an Ogier to be outside the stedding too long, and Loial had left his home a good five years ago. Maybe those brief visits over the last few months had not been enough for him. “Maybe you should go home now, Loial. Stedding Shangtai is a only a few days from here.”
Loial’s chair creaked alarmingly as he sat bolt upright. His ears shot upright, too, in alarm. “My mother will be there, Rand. She’s a famous Speaker. She would never miss a Great Stump.”
“She can’t have come all the way back from the Two Rivers already,” Rand told him. Loial’s mother was supposedly a famous walker, too, yet there were limits, even for Ogier.
“You don’t know my mother,” Loial muttered, a drum booming darkly. “She’ll still have Erith in tow, too. She will.”
Min leaned toward the Ogier, a dangerous light in her eyes. “The way you talk about Erith, I know you want to marry her, so why do you keep running from her?”
Rand studied her from the fireplace. Marriage. Aviendha assumed that he would marry her, and Elayne and Min as well, in the Aiel fashion. Elayne appeared to think so, too, strange as that seemed. He thought she did. What did Min think? She had never said. He should never have let them bond him. The bond would smother them in grief when he died.
Loial’s ears trembled with caution, now. Those ears were one reason Ogier made poor liars. He made placating gestures as though Min were the larger of them. “Well, I do want to, Min. Of course, I do. Erith is beautiful, and very perceptive. Did I ever tell you how carefully she listened to me explain about . . . ? Of course, I did. I tell everybody I meet. I do want to marry her. But not yet. It isn’t like with you humans, Min. You do everything Rand asks. Erith will expect me to settle down and stay home. Wives never let a husband go anywhere or do anything, if it means leaving the stedding for more than a few days. I have my book to finish, and how can I do that if I don’t see everything Rand does? I’m sure he’s done all sorts of things since I left Cairhien, and I know I’ll never get it all down right. Erith just wouldn’t understand. Min? Min, are you angry with me?”
“What makes you think I’m angry?” she said coolly.
Loial sighed heavily, and so clearly in relief that Rand almost stared. Light, the Ogier actually thought she meant she was not angry! Rand knew he was feeling his way in the dark when it came to women, even Min - maybe especially Min - but Loial had better learn a lot more than he already knew before he married his Erith. Otherwise, she would skin him out like a sick goat. Best to get him out of the room before Min did Erith’s job for her. Rand cleared his throat.
“Think on it overnight, Loial,” he said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind by morning.” Part of him hoped Loial would. The Ogier had been too long from home. Another part of him, though. . . . He could use Loial, if what Alivia had told him about the Seanchan was true. Sometimes, he disgusted himself. “In any case, I need to talk to Bashere, now. And Logain.” His mouth tightened around the name. What was Logain doing in Asha’man black?
Loial did not stand. Indeed, his expression grew more troubled, ears slanting back and eyebrows drooping. “Rand, there’s something I need to tell you. About the Aes Sedai who came with us.”
Lightnings flared anew outside the windows as he went on, and the thunder crashed overhead harder than ever. With some storms, a lull only meant the worst was coming.
I told you to kill them all when you had the chance, Lews Therin laughed. I told you.
“Are you positive they’ve been bonded, Samitsu?” Cadsuane asked firmly. And loudly enough to be heard over the thunder booming on the manor house’s rooftop. Thunder and lightning fit her mood. She would have liked to snarl. It required a goodly measure of her training and experience to sit calmly and sip hot ginger tea. She had not let emotion get the upper hand in a very long time, but she wanted to bite something. Or someone.
Samitsu held a porcelain cup of tea, too, but she had yet to swallow a drop, and she had ignored Cadsuane’s offer of a chair. The slender sister turned from peering into the flames of the left-hand fireplace, the bells in her dark hair jingling as she shook her head. She had not bothered to dry her hair properly, and it hung damp and heavy down her back. Her hazel eyes were uneasy. “It’s hardly the sort of question I could ask a sister, now is it, Cadsuane, and they certainly didn’t tell me. As who would? At first, I thought maybe they had done like Merise and Corele. And poor Daigian.” A brief wince of sympathy crossed her face. She knew in full the pain that was gnawing at Daigian over her loss. Any sister beyond her first Warder knew that too well. “But it’s plain Toveine and Gabrelle are both with Logain. I think Gabrelle is bedding him. If there’s bonding been done, it was the men who did it.”
“Turnabout,” Cadsuane muttered into her tea. Some said that turnabout was fair play, but she had never believed in fighting fair. Either you fought, or you did not, and it was never a game. Fairness was for people standing safely to one side, talking while others bled. Unfortunately, there was little she could do beyond trying to find a way to balance events. Balance was not at all the same as fairness. What a dog’s dinner this was turning into. “I’m glad you gave me at least a little warning before I have to face Toveine and the others, but I want you to return to Cairhien the first thing tomorrow.”
“There was nothing I could do, Cadsuane,” Samitsu said bitterly. “Half the people I gave an order had begun checking with Sashalle to see if it was right,
and the other half told me to my face she’d already said different. Lord Bashere talked her into turning the Warders loose - I have no idea how he found out about them in the first place - and she talked Sorilea into it, and there wasn’t the least thing I could do to stop it. Sorilea was behaving as if I had just abdicated! She doesn’t understand, and she made it plain she thinks I’m a fool. There’s no point at all in me going back, unless you expect me to carry Sashalle’s gloves for her.”
“I expect you to watch her, Samitsu. No more than that. I want to know what one of these Dragonsworn sisters does when neither I nor the Wise Ones are looking over their shoulders and holding a switch. You’ve always been very observant.” Patience was not always her strongest trait, but sometimes it was required with Samitsu. The Yellow was observant, and intelligent, and strong-willed most of the time, not to mention the best alive at Healing - at least until the appearance of Darner Flinn - but she could suffer the most astonishing collapses in her confidence. The stick never worked with Samitsu, but pats on the back did, and it was ridiculous not to use what worked. As Cadsuane reminded her how intelligent she was, how skilled at Healing - that was always necessary, with Samitsu; she could go into a depression over failing to Heal a dead man - how clever, the Arafellin sister began to draw up her composure. And her self-assurance. “You can be assured Sashalle won’t change her stockings without I know it,” she said crisply. In truth, Cadsuane expected no less.
“But if you don’t mind me asking,” with her confidence restored, Samitsu’s tone made that the merest courtesy; she was no shrinking flower except when her self-assurance weakened, “why are you here, at the back end of Tear? What’s young al’Thor going to do? Or should I say, what are you going to have him do?”
“He intends something very dangerous,” Cadsuane replied. Lightning flashed outside the windows, sharp silver forks in a sky near as dark as night. She knew exactly what he intended. She just did not know whether to stop it.
“It has to end!” Rand thundered, echoed by the crashes in the sky. He had doffed his coat before this interview, and rolled up his shirtsleeves to bare the Dragons twined around his forearms in scarlet and gold, the golden-maned heads resting on the backs of his hands. He wanted the man in front of him reminded with every look that he was facing the Dragon Reborn. But his hands were fists, to keep him from giving in to Lews Therin’s urgings and throttling bloody Logain Ablar. “I don’t need a war with the White Tower, and you bloody Asha’man bloody well won’t give me a war with the White Tower! Do I make myself understood?”
Logain, hands resting easily atop the long hilt of his sword, did not flinch. He was a big man, if smaller than Rand, with a steady gaze that gave no sign that he had been dressed down or called to account. The silver sword and red-and-gold Dragon glittered brightly in the lamplight on the high collar of his black coat, and that itself looked freshly ironed. “Are you saying release them?” he asked calmly. “Will the Aes Sedai release those of ours they’ve taken?”
“No!” Rand said curtly. And sourly. “What’s done can’t be undone.” Merise had been so shocked when he suggested she release Narishma, you would have thought he was asking her to abandon a puppy by the side of the road. And he suspected Flinn would fight as hard to hang on to Corele as she to him; he was fairly certain there was more between those two than the bond, now. Well, if an Aes Sedai could bond a man who channeled, what was to say a pretty woman could not fix on a girnpy old man? “You realize the mess you’ve created, though, don’t you? As it is, the only man who can channel that Elaida wants alive is me, and that only till the Last Battle is done. Once she learns of this, she’ll be twice as hot to see you all dead any way she can manage it. I don’t know how the other lot will react, but Egwene was always a sharp bargainer. I may have to tell off Asha’man for Aes Sedai to bond until they have as many of you as you do of them. That’s if they don’t just decide you all have to die as soon as they can arrange it, too. What’s done is done, but there cannot be any more!”
Logain stiffened a little more with every word, but his gaze held on Rand’s. It was plain as horns on a ram that he was ignoring the others in the sitting room. Min had wanted no part of this meeting and taken herself off to read; Rand could not make up from down in Herid Pel’s books, but she found them fascinating. He had insisted Loial remain, though, and the Ogier was pretending to study the flames in the fireplace. Except when he glanced at the door, tufted ears twitching, as if wondering whether he could slip out unnoticed under cover of the storm. Davram Bashere appeared even shorter than he really was alongside the Ogier, a graying man with dark tilted eyes, a beak of a nose, and thick mustaches curving down around his mouth. He had worn his sword, too, a shorter blade than Logain’s, and serpentine. Bashere spent more time peering into his winecup than looking at anything else, but whenever his eyes touched Logain, he unconsciously ran a thumb along his sword hilt. Rand thought it was unconscious.
“Taim gave the order,” Logain said, coldly uncomfortable explaining himself in front of an audience. Sudden lightning close to the house cast his face in lurid shadows for an instant, a bleak mask of darkness. “I assumed it came from you.” His eyes moved slightly in Bashere’s direction, and his mouth tightened. “Taim does a great many things people think are at your direction,” he went on reluctantly, “but he has his own plans. Flinn and Narishma and Manfor are on the deserters’ list, like every Asha’man you kept with you. And he has a coterie of twenty or thirty he keeps close and trains privately. Every man who wears the Dragon is one of that group except me, and he’d have kept the Dragon from me, if he dared. No matter what you’ve done, it is time to turn your eyes to the Black Tower before Taim splits it worse than the White Tower is. If he does, you’ll find the larger part is loyal to him, not you. They know him. Most have never even seen you.”
Irritably, Rand pushed his sleeves down and dropped into a chair. What he had done made no matter to Logain. The man knew saidin was clean, but he could not believe Rand or any man had actually done the cleansing. Did he think the Creator had decided to stretch out a merciful hand after three thousand years of suffering? The Creator had made the world and then left humankind to make of it what they would, a heaven or the Pit of Doom by their choosing. The Creator had made many worlds, watched each flower or die, and gone on to make endless worlds beyond. A gardener did not weep for each blossom that fell.
For an instant, he thought those must have been Lews Therin’s reflections. He had never gone on that way about the Creator or anything else that he recalled. But he could feel Lews Therin nodding in approval, a man listening to someone else. Still, it was not the kind of thing he would have considered before Lews Therin. How much space remained between them?
“Taim will have to wait,” he said wearily. How long could Taim wait? He was surprised not to hear Lews Therin raging for him to kill the man. He wished that made him feel easier. “Did you just come to see that Logain reached me safely, Bashere, or to tell me somebody stabbed Dobraine? Or do you have an urgent task for me, too?”
Bashere raised an eyebrow at Rand’s tone, and his jaw tightened as he glanced at Logain, but after a moment, he snorted so hard his thick mustaches should have shaken. “Two men ransacked my tent,” he said, setting his winecup down on a carved blue table against the wall, “one carrying a note I could swear I wrote myself if I didn’t know better. An order to carry away ‘certain items.’ Loial tells me the fellows who knifed Dobraine had the same sort of note, apparently in Dobraine’s hand. A blind man could see what they were after, with a little thought. Dobraine and I are the most likely candidates to be guarding the seals for you. You have three, and you say three are broken. Maybe the Shadow knows where the last is.”
Loial had turned from the fireplace as the Saldaean spoke, his ears rigid, and now he burst out, “That is serious, Rand. If someone breaks all the seals on the Dark One’s prison, or maybe even just one or two more, the Dark One could break free. Even you can
’t face the Dark One! I mean, I know the Prophecies say you will, but that has to be just a way of speaking.” Even Logain looked concerned, his eyes studying Rand as if measuring him against the Dark One.
Rand leaned back in his chair, careful not to let his tiredness show. The seals on the Dark One’s prison on one hand, Taim splitting the Asha’man on the other. Was the seventh seal already broken? Was the Shadow beginning the opening moves of the Last Battle? “You told me something once, Bashere. If your enemy offers you two targets. . . .”
“Strike at a third,” Bashere finished promptly, and Rand nodded. He had already decided, anyway. Thunder rattled the windows till the casements shook. The storm was strengthening.
“I can’t fight the Shadow and the Seanchan at the same time. I am sending the three of you to arrange a truce with the Seanchan.”
Bashere and Logain seemed stunned into silence. Until they began to argue, one on top of the other. Loial just looked ready to faint.
Elza fidgeted, listening to Fearil report what had occurred since she left him in Cairhien. It was not the man’s harsh voice that irritated her. She hated lightning, and wished she could ward away the violent lights flashing in the windows as she had warded her room against eavesdropping. No one would think her wish for privacy strange, since she had spent twenty years convincing everyone that she was married to the pale-haired man. Despite his voice, Fearil looked the sort a woman would marry, tall and lean and quite pretty. The hard edge to his mouth only made his face more so, really. Of course, some might think it peculiar that she had never had more than one Warder at a time, if they stopped to think about it. A man with just the right qualifications was difficult to find, but perhaps she should start looking. Lightning lit up the windows again.
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