There was nothing for Rand except to make the proper response. Once he had not known it. "By my honor and the Light, my life will be a dagger for Sightblinder's heart."
"Until the Last Day," the Aiel finished, "to Shayol Ghul itself." The harper played on pacifically.
The chiefs filed out past the two women, eyeing Moiraine respectfully. There was nothing of fear in them. Rand wished he could be as sure of himself. Moiraine had too many plans for him, too many ways of pulling strings he did not know she had tied to him.
The two women came in as soon as the chiefs were gone, Moiraine as cool and elegant as ever. A small, pretty woman, with or without those Aes Sedai features he could never put an age to, she had abandoned the damp, cooling cloth for her temples. In its place, a small blue stone hung suspended on her forehead from a fine golden chain in her dark hair. It would not have mattered if she had kept it; nothing could diminish her queenly carriage. She usually seemed to own a foot more height than she actually had, and her eyes were all confidence and command.
The other woman was taller, though still short of his shoulder, and young, not ageless. Egwene, whom he had grown up with. Now, except for her big dark eyes, she could almost have passed as an Aiel woman, and not only for her tanned face and hands. She wore a full Aiel skirt of brown wool and a loose white blouse of a plant fiber called algode. Algode was softer than even the finest-woven wool; it would do very well for trade, if he ever convinced the Aiel. A gray shawl hung around Egwene's shoulders, and a folded gray scarf made a wide band to hold back the dark hair that fell below her shoulders. Unlike most Aiel women, she wore only one bracelet, ivory carved into a circle of flames, and a single necklace of gold and ivory beads. And one more thing. A Great Serpent ring on her left hand.
Egwene had been studying with some of the Aiel Wise Ones — exactly what, Rand did not know, though he more than suspected something to do with dreams; Egwene and the Aiel women were closemouthed — but she had studied in the White Tower, too. She was one of the Accepted, on the way to becoming Aes Sedai. And passing herself off, here and in Tear at least, as full Aes Sedai already. Sometimes he teased her about that; she did not take his japes very well, though.
"The wagons will be ready to leave for Tar Valon soon," Moiraine said. Her voice was musical, crystalline.
"Send a strong guard," Rand said, "or Kadere may not take them where you want." He turned for the windows again, wanting to look out and think, about Kadere. "You've not needed me to hold your hand or give you permission before."
Abruptly something seemed to strike him across the shoulders, for all the world like a thick hickory stick; only the slight feel of goose bumps on his skin, not likely in this heat, told him that one of the women had channeled.
Spinning back to face them, he reached out to saidin, filled himself with the One Power. The Power felt like life itself swelling inside him, as if he were ten times, a hundred times as alive; the Dark One's taint filled him, too, death and corruption, like maggots crawling in his mouth. It was a torrent that threatened to sweep him away, a raging flood he had to fight every moment. He was almost used to it now, and at the same time he would never be used to it. He wanted to hold on to the sweetness of saidin forever, and he wanted to vomit. And all the while the deluge tried to scour him to the bone and burn his bones to ash.
The taint would drive him mad eventually, if the Power did not kill him first; it was a race between the two. Madness had been the fate of every man who had channeled since the Breaking of the World began, since that day when Lews Therin Telamon, the Dragon, and his Hundred Companions had sealed up the Dark One's prison at Shayol Ghul. The last backblast from that sealing had tainted the male half of the True Source, and men who could channel, madmen who could channel, had torn the world apart.
He filled himself with the Power… And he could not tell which woman had done it. They both looked at him as if butter would not melt in their mouths, each with an eyebrow arched almost identically in slightly amused questioning. Either or both could be embracing the female half of the Source right that instant, and he would never know.
Of course, a stick across the shoulders was not Moiraine's way; she found other means of chastising, more subtle, usually more painful in the end. Yet even sure that it must have been Egwene, he did nothing. Proof. Thought slid along the outside of the Void; he floated within, in emptiness, thought and emotion, even his anger, distant. I will do nothing without proof. I will not be goaded, this time. She was not the Egwene he had grown up with; she had become part of the Tower since Moiraine sent her there. Moiraine again. Always Moiraine. Sometimes he wished he were rid of Moiraine. Only sometimes?
He concentrated on her. "What do you want of me?" His voice sounded flat and cold to his own ears. The Power stormed inside him. Egwene had told him that for a woman, touching saidar, the female half of the Source, was an embrace; for a man, always, it was a war without mercy. "And don't mention wagons again, little sister. I usually find out what you mean to do long after it is done."
The Aes Sedai frowned at him, and no wonder. She was surely not used to being addressed so, not by any man, even the Dragon Reborn. He had no idea himself where "little sister" had come from; sometimes of late words seemed to pop into his head. A touch of madness, perhaps. Some nights he lay awake till the small hours, worrying about that. Inside the Void, it seemed someone else's worry.
"We should speak alone." She gave the harper a cool glance.
Jasin Natael, as he called himself here, lay half-sprawled on cushions against one of the windowless walls, softly playing the harp perched on his knee, its upper arm carved and gilded to resemble the creatures on Rand's forearms. Dragons, the Aiel called them. Rand had only suspicions where Natael had gotten the thing. He was a dark-haired man, who would have been accounted taller than most elsewhere than the Aiel Waste, in his middle years. His coat and breeches were dark blue silk suitable for a royal court, elaborately embroidered with thread-of-gold on collar and cuffs, everything buttoned up or laced despite the heat. The fine clothes were at odds with his gleeman's cloak spread out beside him. A perfectly sound cloak, but covered completely with hundreds of patches in nearly as many colors, all sewn so as to flutter at the slightest breeze, it signified a country entertainer, a juggler and tumbler, musician and storyteller who wandered from village to village. Certainly not a man to wear silk. The man had his conceits. He appeared completely immersed in his music.
"You can say what you wish in front of Natael," Rand said. "He is gleeman to the Dragon Reborn, after all." If keeping the matter secret was important enough, she would press it, and he would send Natael away, though he did not like the man to be out of his sight.
Egwene sniffed loudly and shifted her shawl on her shoulders. "Your head is swelled up like an overripe melon, Rand al'Thor." She said it flatly, as a statement of fact.
Anger bubbled outside the Void. Not at what she had said; she had been in the habit of trying to take him down a rung even when they were children, usually whether he deserved it or not. But of late it seemed to him she had taken to working with Moiraine, trying to put him off balance so the Aes Sedai could push him where she wanted. When they were younger, before they learned what he was, he and Egwene had thought they would marry one day. And now she sided with Moiraine against him.
Face hard, he spoke more roughly than he intended. "Tell me what you want, Moiraine. Tell me here and now, or let it wait until I can find time for you. I'm very busy." That was an outright lie. Most of his time was spent practicing the sword with Lan, or the spears with Rhuarc, or learning to fight with hands and feet from both. But if there was any bullying to be done here today, he would do it. Natael could hear anything. Almost anything. So long as Rand knew where he was at all times.
Moiraine and Egwene both frowned, but the real Aes Sedai at least seemed to see he would not be budged this time. She glanced at Natael, her mouth tightening — the man still seemed deep in his music — then took a thick wad of
gray silk from her pouch.
Unfolding it, she laid what it had contained on the table, a disc the size of a man's hand; half dead black, half purest white, the two colors meeting in a sinuous line to form two joined teardrops. That had been the symbol of Aes Sedai, before the Breaking, but this disc was more. Only seven like it had ever been made, the seals on the Dark One's prison. Or rather, each was a focus for one of those seals. Drawing her belt knife, its hilt wrapped in silver wire, Moiraine scraped delicately at the edge of the disc. And a tiny flake of solid black fell away.
Even encased in the Void, Rand gasped. The emptiness itself quivered, and for an instant the Power threatened to overwhelm him. "Is this a copy? A fake?"
"I found this in the square below," Moiraine said. "It is real, though. The one I brought with me from Tear is the same." She could have been saying she wanted pea soup for the midday meal. Egwene, on the other hand, clutched her shawl around her as if cold.
Rand felt the stirrings of fright himself, oozing across the surface of the Void. It was an effort to let go of saidin, but he forced himself. If he lost concentration, the Power could destroy him where he stood, and he wanted all his attention on the matter at hand. Even so, even with the taint, it was a loss.
That flake lying on the table was impossible. Those discs were made of cuendillar, heartstone, and nothing made of cuendillar could be broken, not even by the One Power. Whatever force was used against it only made it stronger. The making of heartstone had been lost in the Breaking of the World, but whatever had been made of it during the Age of Legends still existed, even the most fragile vase, even if the Breaking had sunk it to the bottom of the ocean or buried it beneath a mountain. Of course, three of the seven discs were broken already, but it had taken a good deal more than a knife.
Come to think of it, though, he did not know how those three really had been broken. If no force short of the Creator could break heartstone, then that should be that.
"How?" he asked, surprised that his voice was still as steady as when the Void had surrounded him.
"I do not know," Moiraine replied, just as calm outwardly. "But you do see the problem? A fall from the table could break this. If the others, wherever they may be, are like this, four men with hammers could break open that hole in the Dark One's prison again. Who can even say how effective one is, in this condition?"
Rand saw. I'm not ready yet. He was not sure he ever would be ready, but he surely was not yet. Egwene looked as though she were staring into her own open grave.
Rewrapping the disc, Moiraine replaced it in her pouch. "Perhaps I will think of a possibility before I carry this to Tar Valon. If we know why, perhaps something can be done about it."
He was caught by the image of the Dark One reaching out from Shayol Ghul once more, eventually breaking free completely; fires and darkness covered the world in his mind, flames that consumed and gave no light, blackness solid as stone squeezing the air. With that filling his head, what Moiraine had just said took a moment to penetrate. "You intend to go yourself?" He had thought she meant to stick to him like moss to a rock. Isn't this what you want?
"Eventually," Moiraine replied quietly. "Eventually I will have to leave you, after all. What will be, must be." Rand thought she shivered, but it was so quick it could have been his imagination, and the next instant she was all composure and self-control once more. "You must be ready." The reminder of his doubts came unpleasantly. "We should discuss your plans. You cannot sit here much longer. Even if the Forsaken are not planning to come after you, they are out there, spreading their power. Gathering the Aiel will do no good if you find that everything beyond the Spine of the World is in their hands."
Chuckling, Rand leaned back against the table. So this was just another ploy; if he was anxious about her leaving, perhaps he would be more willing to listen, more amenable to being guided. She could not lie, of course, not right out. One of the vaunted Three Oaths took care of that: to speak no word that was not true. He had learned that it left a barn-width of wriggle room. She would leave him alone eventually. After he was dead, no doubt.
"You want to discuss my plans," he said dryly. Pulling a short-stemmed pipe and a leather tabac pouch from his coat pocket, he thumbed the bowl full and briefly touched saidin to channel a flame dancing above the tabac. "Why? They are my plans." Puffing slowly, he waited, ignoring Egwene's glower.
The Aes Sedai's face never changed, but her large, dark eyes seemed to blaze. "What have you done when you refused to be guided by me?" Her voice was as cool as her features, yet the words still seemed to come like whip-cracks. "Wherever you have gone, you have left death, destruction and war behind you."
"Not in Tear," he said, too quickly. And too defensively. He must not let her put him off balance. Determinedly, he took spaced, deliberate puffs at his pipe.
"No," she agreed, "not in Tear. For once you had a nation behind you, a people, and what did you do with it? Bringing justice to Tear was commendable. Establishing order in Cairhien, feeding the hungry, is laudable. Another time I would praise you for it." She herself was Cairhienin. "But it does not help you toward the day you face Tarmon Gai'don." A single-minded woman, and cold when it came to anything else, even her own land. But should he not be just as single-minded?
"What would you have me do? Hunt down the Forsaken one by one?" Again he forced himself to draw more slowly on the pipe; it was an effort. "Do you even know where they are? Oh, Sammael is in Illian — you know that — but the rest? What if I go after Sammael as you wish, and find two or three or four of them? Or all nine?"
"You could have faced three or four, perhaps all nine surviving," she said icily, "had you not left Callandor in Tear. The truth is, you are running. You do not really have a plan, not a plan to ready you for the Last Battle. You run from place to place, hoping that in some way everything will come out for the best. Hoping, because you do not know what else to do. If you would take my advice, at least you —" He cut her off, gesturing sharply with his pipe, with never a care for the glares the two women gave him.
"I do have a plan." If they wanted to know, let them know, and he would be burned if he changed a word. "First, I mean to put an end to the wars and killing, whether I started them or not. If men have to kill, let them kill Trollocs, not each other. In the Aiel War, four clans crossed the Dragonwall, and had their way for better than two years. They looted and burned Cairhien, defeated every army sent against them. They could have taken Tar Valon, had they wanted. The Tower couldn't have stopped them, because of your Three Oaths." Not to use the Power as a weapon except against Shadowspawn or Darkfriends, or in defense of their own lives, that was another of the Oaths, and the Aiel had not threatened the Tower itself. Anger had him in its grip now. Running and hoping, was he? "Four clans did that. What will happen when I lead eleven across the Spine of the World?" It would have to be eleven; small hope of bringing in the Shaido. "By the time the nations even think of uniting, it will be too late. They'll accept my peace, or I'll be buried in the Can Breat." A discordant plunk rose from the harp, and Natael bent over the instrument, shaking his head. In a moment the soothing sounds came again.
"A melon couldn't be swollen enough for your head," Egwene muttered, folding her arms beneath her breasts. "And a stone couldn't be as stubborn! Moiraine is only trying to help you. Why won't you see that?"
The Aes Sedai smoothed her silk skirts, though they did not need it. "Taking the Aiel across the Dragonwall might be the worst thing you could possibly do." There was an edge to her voice, anger or frustration. At least he was getting across to her that he was no puppet. "By this time, the Amyrlin Seat will be approaching the rulers of every nation that still has a ruler, laying the proofs before them that you are the Dragon Reborn. They know the Prophecies; they know what you were born to do. Once they are convinced of who and what you are, they will accept you because they must. The Last Battle is coming, and you are their only hope, humankind's only hope."
Rand laughed out loud. It
was a bitter laugh. Sticking his pipe between his teeth, he hoisted himself to sit cross-legged atop the table, staring at them. "So you and Siuan Sanche still think you know everything there is to know." The Light willing, they did not know near everything about him, and would never find out. "You're both fools."
"Show some respect!" Egwene growled, but Rand went on over her words.
"The Tairen High Lords know the Prophecies, too, and they knew me, once they saw the Sword That Cannot Be Touched clutched in my fist. Half of them expect me to bring them power or glory or both. The other half would as soon slip a knife in my back and try to forget the Dragon Reborn was ever in Tear. That is how the nations will greet the Dragon Reborn. Unless I quell them first, the same way I did the Tairens. Do you know why I left Callandor in Tear? To remind them of me. Every day they know it is there, driven into the Heart of the Stone, and they know I'll come back for it. That is what holds them to me." That was one reason he had left the Sword That Is Not a Sword behind. He did not like even to think of the other.
"Be very careful," Moiraine said after a moment. Just that, in a voice all frozen calm. He heard stark warning in the words. Once he had heard her say in much the same tone that she would see him dead before letting the Shadow have him. A hard woman.
For a long moment she gazed at him, her eyes dark pools that threatened to swallow him. Then she made a perfect curtsy. "By your leave, my Lord Dragon, I will see to letting Master Kadere know where I expect him to work tomorrow."
No one could have seen or heard the faintest mockery in action or words, but Rand felt it. Anything that might put him off balance, make him more biddable by guilt or shame or uncertainty or whatever, she would try. He stared after her until the clicking beads in the doorway obscured her…
"There is no need you scowling like that, Rand al'Thor." Egwene's voice was low, her eyes irate; she held on to her shawl as if she wanted to strangle him with it. "Lord Dragon, indeed! Whatever you are, you're a rude, ill-mannered lout. You deserve more than you got. It would not kill you to be civil!"
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