The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  Twisting around, he grabbed her arm, pulled her off his back, and sat her against the wall. When he sat up himself, she was sitting there across from him, rubbing her arm furiously. “You really would have, wouldn’t you?” he said angrily. “You’re fooling with things you don’t understand. You could have burned both of us to charcoal!”

  “Men! When you cannot win an argument, you either run away or resort to force.”

  “Hold on there! Who tripped who? Who sat on who? And you threatened—tried!—to—” He raised both hands. “No, you don’t. You do this to me all the time. Whenever you realize the argument isn’t going the way you want, suddenly we are arguing about something else completely. Not this time.”

  “I am not arguing,” she said calmly, “and I am not changing the subject, either. What is hiding except running away? And after you hide, you’ll run away for true. And what about hurting Mat, and Perrin, and Loial? And me? I know why. You’re afraid you will hurt somebody even worse if you let them stay near you. If you don’t do what you shouldn’t, then you do not have to worry about hurting anybody. All this running around and striking out, and you don’t even know if there’s a reason. Why should the Amyrlin, or any Aes Sedai but Moiraine, even know you exist?”

  For a moment he stared at her. The longer she spent with Moiraine and Nynaeve, the more she took on their manner, at least when she wanted to. They were much alike at times, the Aes Sedai and the Wisdom, distant and knowing. It was disconcerting coming from Egwene. Finally he told her what Lan had said. “What else could he mean?”

  Her hand froze on her arm, and she frowned with concentration. “Moiraine knows about you, and she hasn’t done anything, so why should she now? But if Lan. . . .” Still frowning, she met his eyes. “The storerooms are the first place they will look. If they do look. Until we find out if they are looking, we need to put you somewhere they would never think of searching. I know. The dungeon.”

  He scrambled to his feet. “The dungeon!”

  “Not in a cell, silly. I go there some evenings to visit Padan Fain. Nynaeve does, too. No one will think it odd if I go early today. In truth, with everybody looking to the Amyrlin, no one will even notice us.”

  “But, Moiraine. . . .”

  “She doesn’t go to the dungeons to question Master Fain. She has him brought to her. And she has not done that very much for weeks. Believe me, you will be safe there.”

  Still, he hesitated. Padan Fain. “Why do you visit the peddler, anyway? He’s a Darkfriend, admitted out of his own mouth, and a bad one. Burn me, Egwene, he brought the Trollocs to Emond’s Field! The Dark One’s hound, he called himself, and he has been sniffing on my trail since Winternight.”

  “Well, he is safe behind iron bars now, Rand.” It was her turn to hesitate, and she looked at him almost pleading. “Rand, he has brought his wagon into the Two Rivers every spring since before I was born. He knows all the people I know, all the places. It’s strange, but the longer he has been locked up, the easier in himself he has become. It’s almost as if he is breaking free of the Dark One. He laughs again, and tells funny stories, about Emond’s Field folk, and sometimes about places I never heard of before. Sometimes he is almost like his old self. I just like to talk to somebody about home.”

  Since I’ve been avoiding you, he thought, and since Perrin’s been avoiding everybody, and Mat’s been spending all his time gambling and carousing. “I shouldn’t have kept to myself so much,” he muttered, then sighed. “Well, if Moiraine thinks it’s safe enough for you, I suppose it is safe enough for me. But there’s no need for you to be mixed in it.”

  Egwene got to her feet and concentrated on brushing off her dress, avoiding his eye.

  “Moiraine has said it’s safe? Egwene?”

  “Moiraine Sedai has never told me I could not visit Master Fain,” she said carefully.

  He stared at her, then burst out, “You never asked her. She doesn’t know. Egwene, that’s stupid. Padan Fain’s a Darkfriend, and as bad as ever a Darkfriend was.”

  “He is locked in a cage,” she said stiffly, “and I do not have to ask Moiraine’s permission for everything I do. It is a little late for you to start worrying about doing what an Aes Sedai thinks, isn’t it? Now, are you coming?”

  “I can find the dungeon without you. They are looking for me, or will be, and it won’t do you any good to be found with me.”

  “Without me,” she said dryly, “you’ll likely trip over your own feet and fall in the Amyrlin Seat’s lap, then confess everything while trying to talk your way out of it.”

  “Blood and ashes, you ought to be in the Women’s Circle back home. If men were all as fumble-footed and helpless as you seem to think, we’d never—”

  “Are you going to stand here talking until they do find you? Pick up your things, Rand, and come with me.” Not waiting for an answer, she spun around and started off down the hall. Muttering under his breath, he reluctantly obeyed.

  There were few people—servants, mainly—in the back ways they took, but Rand had the feeling that they all took special notice of him. Not notice of a man burdened for a journey, but of him, Rand al’Thor in particular. He knew it was his imagination—he hoped it was—but even so, he felt no relief when they stopped in a passageway deep beneath the keep, before a tall door with a small iron grill set in it, as thickly strapped with iron as any in the outer wall. A clapper hung below the grill.

  Through the grill Rand could see bare walls, and two top-knotted soldiers sitting bareheaded at a table with a lamp on it. One of the men was sharpening a dagger with long, slow strokes of a stone. His strokes never faltered when Egwene rapped with the clapper, a sharp clang of iron on iron. The other man, his face flat and sullen, looked at the door as if considering before he finally rose and came over. He was squat and stocky, barely tall enough to look through the cross-hatched bars.

  “What do you want? Oh, it’s you again, girl. Come to see your Darkfriend? Who’s that?” He made no move to open the door.

  “He’s a friend of mine, Changu. He wants to see Master Fain, too.”

  The man studied Rand, his upper lip quivering back to bare teeth. Rand did not think it was supposed to be a smile. “Well,” Changu said finally. “Well. Tall, aren’t you? Tall. And fancy dressed for your kind. Somebody catch you young in the Eastern Marches and tame you?” He slammed back the bolts and yanked open the door. “Well, come in if you’re coming.” He took on a mocking tone. “Take care not to bump your head, my Lord.”

  There was no danger of that; the door was tall enough for Loial. Rand followed Egwene in, frowning and wondering if this Changu meant to make some sort of trouble. He was the first rude Shienaran Rand had met; even Masema was only cold, not really rude. But the fellow just banged the door shut and rammed the heavy bolts home, then went to some shelves beyond the end of the table and took one of the lamps there. The other man never ceased stropping his knife, never even looked up from it. The room was bare except for the table and benches and shelves, with straw on the floor and another iron-bound door leading deeper in.

  “You’ll want some light, won’t you,” Changu said, “in there in the dark with your Darkfriend friend.” He laughed, coarse and humorless, and lit the lamp. “He’s waiting for you.” He thrust the lamp at Egwene, and undid the inner door almost eagerly. “Waiting for you. In there, in the dark.”

  Rand paused uneasily at the blackness beyond, and Changu grinning behind, but Egwene caught his sleeve and pulled him in. The door slammed, almost catching his heel; the latch bars clanged shut. There was only the light of the lamp, a small pool around them in the darkness.

  “Are you sure he’ll let us out?” he asked. The man had never even looked at his sword or bow, he realized, never asked what was in his bundles. “They aren’t very good guards. We could be here to break Fain free for all he knows.”

  “They know me better than that,” she said, but she sounded troubled, and she added, “They seem worse every time I come
. All the guards do. Meaner, and more sullen. Changu told jokes the first time I came, and Nidao never even speaks anymore. But I suppose working in a place like this can’t give a man a light heart. Maybe it is just me. This place does not do my heart any good, either.” Despite her words, she drew him confidently into the black. He kept his free hand on his sword.

  The pale lamplight showed a wide hall with flat iron grills to either side, fronting stone-walled cells. Only two of the cells they passed held prisoners. The occupants sat up on their narrow cots as the light struck them, shielding their eyes with their hands, glaring between their fingers. Even with their faces hidden, Rand was sure they were glaring. Their eyes glittered in the lamplight.

  “That one likes to drink and fight,” Egwene murmured, indicating a burly fellow with sunken knuckles. “This time he wrecked the common room of an inn in the town single-handed, and hurt some men badly.” The other prisoner wore a gold-embroidered coat with wide sleeves, and low, gleaming boots. “He tried to leave the city without settling his inn bill”—she sniffed loudly at that; her father was an innkeeper as well as Mayor of Emond’s Field—“nor paying half a dozen shopkeepers and merchants what he owed.”

  The men snarled at them, guttural curses as bad as any Rand had heard from merchants’ guards.

  “They grow worse every day, too,” she said in a tight voice, and quickened her step.

  She was enough ahead of him when they reached Padan Fain’s cell, at the very end, that Rand was out of the light entirely. He stopped there, in the shadows behind her lamp.

  Fain was sitting on his cot, leaning forward expectantly as if waiting, just as Changu had said. He was a bony, sharp-eyed man, with long arms and a big nose, even more gaunt now than Rand remembered. Not gaunt from the dungeon—the food here was the same as the servants ate, and not even the worst prisoner was shorted—but from what he had done before coming to Fal Dara.

  The sight of him brought back memories Rand would just as soon have done without. Fain on the seat of his big peddler’s wagon wheeling across the Wagon Bridge, arriving in Emond’s Field the day of Winternight. And on Winternight the Trollocs came, killing and burning, hunting. Hunting three young men, Moiraine had said. Hunting me, if they only knew it, and using Fain for their trail hound.

  Fain stood at Egwene’s approach, not shielding his eyes or even blinking at the light. He smiled at her, a smile that touched only his lips, then raised his eyes above her head. Looking straight at Rand, hidden in the blackness behind the light, he pointed a long finger at him. “I feel you there, hiding, Rand al’Thor,” he said, almost crooning. “You can’t hide, not from me, and not from them. You thought it was over, did you not? But the battle’s never done, al’Thor. They are coming for me, and they’re coming for you, and the war goes on. Whether you live or die, it’s never over for you. Never.” Suddenly he began to chant.

  “Soon comes the day all shall be free.

  Even you, and even me.

  Soon comes the day all shall die.

  Surely you, but never I.”

  He let his arm fall, and his eyes rose to stare intently at an angle up into the darkness. A crooked grin twisting his mouth, he chuckled deep in his throat as if whatever he saw was amusing. “Mordeth knows more than all of you. Mordeth knows.”

  Egwene backed away from the cell until she reached Rand, and only the edge of the light touched the bars of Fain’s cell. Darkness hid the peddler, but they could still hear his chuckles. Even unable to see him, Rand was sure Fain was still peering off at nothing.

  With a shiver, he pried his fingers off his sword hilt. “Light!” he said hoarsely. “This is what you call being like he used to be?”

  “Sometimes he’s better, and sometimes worse.” Egwene’s voice was unsteady. “This is worse—much worse than usual.”

  “What is he seeing, I wonder. He’s mad, staring at a stone ceiling in the dark.” If the stone weren’t there, he’d be looking straight at the women’s apartments. Where Moiraine is, and the Amyrlin Seat. He shivered again. “He’s mad.”

  “This was not a good idea, Rand.” Looking over her shoulder at the cell, she drew him away from it and lowered her voice as if afraid Fain might overhear. Fain’s chuckles followed them. “Even if they don’t look here, I cannot stay here with him like this, and I do not think you should, either. There is something about him today that. . . .” She drew a shaky breath. “There is one place even safer from search than here. I did not mention it before because it was easier to get you in here, but they will never look in the women’s apartments. Never.”

  “The women’s . . . ! Egwene, Fain may be mad, but you’re madder. You can’t hide from hornets in a hornets’ nest.”

  “What better place? What is the one part of the keep no man will enter without a woman’s invitation, not even Lord Agelmar? What is the one place no one would ever think to look for a man?”

  “What is the one place in the keep sure to be full of Aes Sedai? It is crazy, Egwene.”

  Poking at his bundles, she spoke as if it were all decided. “You must wrap your sword and bow in your cloak, and then it will look as if you are carrying things for me. It should not be too hard to find you a jerkin and a shirt that isn’t so pretty. You will have to stoop, though.”

  “I told you, I won’t do it.”

  “Since you’re acting stubborn as a mule, you should take right to playing my beast of burden. Unless you would really rather stay down here with him.”

  Fain’s laughing whisper came through the black shadows. “The battle’s never done, al’Thor. Mordeth knows.”

  “I’d have a better chance jumping off the wall,” Rand muttered. But he unslung his bundles and set about wrapping sword and bow and quiver as she had suggested.

  In the darkness, Fain laughed. “It’s never over, al’Thor. Never.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Summoned

  Alone in her rooms in the women’s apartments, Moiraine adjusted the shawl, embroidered with curling ivy and grapevines, on her shoulders and studied the effect in the tall frame mirror standing in a corner. Her large, dark eyes could appear as sharp as a hawk’s when she was angry. They seemed to pierce the silvered glass, now. It was only happenstance that she had had the shawl in her saddlebags when she came to Fal Dara. With the blazing white Flame of Tar Valon centered on the wearer’s back and long fringe colored to show her Ajah—Moiraine’s was as blue as a morning sky—the shawls were seldom worn outside Tar Valon, and even there usually only inside the White Tower. Little in Tar Valon besides a meeting of the Hall of the Tower called for the formality of the shawls, and beyond the Shining Walls a sight of the Flame would send too many people running, to hide or perhaps to fetch the Children of the Light. A Whitecloak’s arrow was as fatal to an Aes Sedai as to anyone else, and the Children were too wily to let an Aes Sedai see the bowman before the arrow struck, while she still might do something about it. Moiraine had certainly never expected to wear the shawl in Fal Dara. But for an audience with the Amyrlin, there were proprieties to observe.

  She was slender and not at all tall, and smooth-cheeked Aes Sedai agelessness often made her appear younger than she was, but Moiraine had a commanding grace and calm presence that could dominate any gathering. A manner ingrained growing up in the Royal Palace of Cairhien had been heightened, not submerged, by still more years as an Aes Sedai. She knew she might need every bit of it today. Yet much of the calm was on the surface, today. There must be trouble, or she would not have come herself, she thought for at least the tenth time. But beyond that lay a thousand questions more. What trouble, and who did she choose to accompany her? Why here? Why now? It cannot be allowed to go wrong now.

  The Great Serpent ring on her right hand caught the light dully as she touched the delicate golden chain fastened in her dark hair, which hung in waves to her shoulders. A small, clear blue stone dangled from the chain, in the middle of her forehead. Many in the White Tower knew of the tricks she could do using that sto
ne as a focus. It was only a polished bit of blue crystal, just something a young girl had used in her first learning, with no one to guide her. That girl had remembered tales of angreal and even more powerful sa’angreal—those fabled remnants of the Age of Legends that allowed Aes Sedai to channel more of the One Power than any could safely handle unaided—remembered and thought some such focus was required to channel at all. Her sisters in the White Tower knew a few of her tricks, and suspected others, including some that did not exist, some that had shocked her when she learned of them. The things she did with the stone were simple and small, if occasionally useful; the kind a child would imagine. But if the wrong women had accompanied the Amyrlin, the crystal might put them off balance, because of the tales.

  A rapid, insistent knocking came at the chamber door. No Shienaran would knock that way, not at anyone’s door, but least of all hers. She remained looking into the mirror until her eyes stared back serenely, all thought hidden in their dark depths. She checked the soft leather pouch hanging at her belt. Whatever troubles brought her out of Tar Valon, she will forget them when I lay this trouble before her. A second thumping, even more vigorous than the first, sounded before she crossed the room and opened the door with a calm smile for the two women who had come for her.

  She recognized them both. Dark-haired Anaiya in her blue-fringed shawl, and fair-haired Liandrin in her red. Liandrin, not only young-seeming but young and pretty, with a doll’s face and a small, petulant mouth, had her hand raised to pound again. Her dark brows and darker eyes were a sharp contrast to the multitude of pale honey braids brushing her shoulders, but the combination was not uncommon in Tarabon. Both women were taller than Moiraine, though Liandrin by less than a hand.