“I hope your luck is in,” Nalesean said, holding the token carefully for the ink to dry. Bookers could be touchy about paying on a token with smeared ink, and no one was touchier than an Ebou Dari. “I know you don’t lose often, but I’ve seen it happen, burn me but I have. There’s a lass I mean to step out with at the dancing tonight. Just a seamstress . . .” He was a lord, though not a bad fellow really, and such things seemed important to him. “. . . but pretty enough to dry your mouth. She likes trinkets. Golden trinkets. She likes fireworks, too—I hear some Illuminators are setting up for tonight; you’ll be interested in that—but it’s trinkets make her smile. She won’t be friendly if I cannot afford to make her smile, Mat.”
“You’ll make her smile,” Mat said absently. The horses were still walking in a circle above the starting poles. Olver sat proudly on Wind’s back, broad mouth grinning to split his more-than-plain face from jug-ear to jug-ear. In Ebou Dari races, all the riders were boys; a few miles inland, they used girls. Olver was the smallest here today, the lightest, not that the leggy gray gelding needed the advantage. “You’ll make her laugh till she can’t stand up.” Nalesean gave him a frown he barely noticed. The man should know gold was one thing Mat never had to worry about. He might not always win, but close enough. His luck had nothing to do with whether Wind won anyway. Of that he was sure.
Gold did not concern him, but Olver did. There was no rule against the boys using their switches on each other instead of their mounts. In every race so far, Wind had broken to the lead and stayed there, but if Olver took any hurt, even just a bruise, Mat would never hear the end. Not from Mistress Anan, his innkeeper, not from Nynaeve or Elayne, not from Aviendha or Birgitte. The onetime Maiden of the Spear and the peculiar woman Elayne had taken as a Warder were the last he would have expected to gush with maternal feelings, yet they had already tried to move the boy out of The Wandering Woman behind his back and into the Tarasin Palace. Anywhere with so many Aes Sedai was the last place for Olver, or for anybody, but one bump and instead of telling Birgitte and Aviendha they had no right to take the boy, Setalle Anan would likely hustle him off there herself. Olver would probably cry himself to sleep if he was not allowed to race anymore, but women never understood these things. For about the thousandth time, Mat cursed Nalesean for sneaking Olver and Wind to those first races. Of course, they had to find something to fill all the idle hours on their hands, but they could have found something else. Cutting purses could have been no worse in the women’s eyes.
“Here’s the thief-catcher,” Nalesean said, stuffing the token into his coat. He did not quite sneer. “Much good he’s done so far. We’d have done better to bring another fifty soldiers instead.”
Juilin strode though the crowd purposefully, a dark, hard man using a slender bamboo staff as tall as himself for a walking stick. With a flat-topped conical red Taraboner cap on his head and a plain coat, tight to the waist then flaring to his boot tops, well-worn and plainly not the coat of someone rich, he normally would not have been allowed below the ropes, but he made out to study the horses and ostentatiously bounced a fat coin on his palm. Several of the bookers’ guards looked at him suspiciously, but the gold crown let him pass.
“Well?” Mat said sourly, tugging his hat low, once the thief-catcher reached him. “No, let me tell you. They slipped out of the palace again. No one saw them go, again. Nobody has any bloody idea where they are, again.”
Juilin tucked the coin carefully into his coat pocket. He would make no wager; he seemed to save every copper that came into his hands. “All four of them took a closed coach from the palace to a landing on the river, where they hired a boat. Thom hired another to follow and see where they’re going. Nowhere dark or unpleasant, I’d say, by their clothes. But it is true, nobles wear silk to crawl in the mud.” He grinned at Nalesean, who folded his arms and pretended to be engrossed in the horses. The grin was a mere baring of teeth. They were both Tairen, but the gap between noble and common stood wide in Tear, and neither man liked the other’s company.
“Women!” Several finely dressed specimens nearby turned to eye Mat askance from beneath bright parasols. He frowned right back, though two were pretty, and they set to laughing and chattering among themselves as though he had done something amusing. A woman would do a thing until you were sure she always would, then do something else just to fuddle you. But he had promised Rand to see Elayne safely to Caemlyn, and Nynaeve and Egwene with her. And he had promised Egwene to see the other two safe on this trip to Ebou Dar, not to mention Aviendha; that was the price of getting Elayne to Caemlyn. Not that they had told him why they needed to be here; oh, no. Not that they had spoken twenty words to him since arriving in the bloody city!
“I’ll see them safe,” he muttered under his breath, “if I have to stuff them into barrels and haul them to Caemlyn in a cart.” He might be the only man in the world who could say that about Aes Sedai without looking over his shoulder, maybe even including Rand and those fellows he was gathering. He touched the foxhead medallion hanging under his shirt to make sure it was there, though he never took it off, even to bathe. It did have flaws, but a man liked to be reminded. “Tarabon must be terrible now for a woman not used to taking care of herself,” Juilin murmured. He was watching three veiled men in tattered coats and baggy once-white trousers scramble up the bank ahead of a pair of bookmen’s guards waving their clubs. No rule said the poor could not come below the ropes, but the bookers’ guards did. The two pretty women who had eyed Mat appeared to be making a private wager on whether the Taraboners would outrun the guards.
“We’ve more than enough women right here without sense to come in out of the rain,” Mat told him. “Go back to that boat landing and wait for Thom. Tell him I need him as soon as possible. I want to know what those fool bloody women are up to.”
Juilin’s look did not quite call him a fool. They had, after all, been trying to find out exactly that for over a month now, ever since coming here. With a last glance at the fleeing men, he sauntered back the way he had come, once more bouncing the coin in his hand.
Frowning, Mat peered across the race course. It was barely fifty paces to the crowd on the other side, and faces leaped out at him—a bent, white-haired old man with a hooked nose, a sharp-faced woman under a hat that seemed mostly plumes, a tall fellow who looked like a stork in green silk and gold braid, a nicely plump, full-mouthed young woman who appeared about to come out of her dress at the top. The longer the heat continued, the fewer and thinner garments women in Ebou Dar wore, but for once he hardly gave them any notice. Weeks had gone by since he so much as glimpsed the women who concerned him now.
Birgitte certainly needed no one to hold her hand; a Hunter for the Horn, anyone who troubled her would be in a deep hole by his estimation. And Aviendha. . . . All she needed was someone to keep her from stabbing everybody who looked at her crossways. As far as he was concerned, she could knife whoever she wanted so long as it was not Elayne. For all the bloody Daughter-Heir walked about with her nose in the air, she turned moon-eyed around Rand, and for all Aviendha behaved as if she would stab any man who glanced her way, she did the same. Rand usually knew how to deal with women, but he had jumped into a bear pit letting that pair come together. It was a short road to disaster, and why ruin had not happened was beyond Mat.
For some reason his eyes drifted back to the sharp-faced woman. She was pretty, if vulpine. About Nynaeve’s age, he estimated; it was hard to tell at the distance, but he could judge women as well as he could horses. Of course, women could fool you faster than any horse. Slim. Why did she make him think of straw? What he could see of her hair beneath the plumed hat was dark. No matter.
Birgitte and Aviendha could do without his shepherding, and normally he would have said the same of Elayne and Nynaeve, however wrongheaded, conceited and downright pushy they could be. That they had been sneaking out all this time said differently, though. Wrongheadedness was the key. They were the sort who berated a man for
meddling and chased him away, then berated him again for not being there when he was needed. Not that they would admit he was needed, even then, not them. Raise a hand to help and you were interfering, do nothing and you were an un-trustworthy wastrel.
The fox-faced woman across the way popped into his view again. Not straw; a stable. Which made no more sense. He had had fine times in stables with many a young woman and some not so young, but she wore modestly cut blue silk with a high neck right under her chin trimmed in snowy lace, and more spilling over her hands. A lady, and he avoided noblewomen like death. Playing haughty like a harp, expecting a man always to be at their beck and call. Not Mat Cauthon. Strangely, she was fanning herself with a spray of white plumes. Where was her maid? A knife. Why should she make him think of a knife? And . . . fire? Something burning, anyway.
Shaking his head, he tried to focus on what was important. Other men’s memories, of battles and courts and lands vanished centuries ago, filled holes in his own, places where his own life suddenly went thin or was not there at all. He could remember fleeing the Two Rivers with Moiraine and Lan quite clearly for example, but almost nothing more until reaching Caemlyn, and there were gaps before and after, as well. If whole years of his own growing up lay beyond recall, why should he expect to recollect every woman he had met? Maybe she reminded him of some woman dead a thousand years or more; the Light knew that happened often enough. Even Birgitte sometimes tickled his memory. Well, there were four women here and now who had his brain tied in knots. They were what was important.
Nynaeve and the others were avoiding him as if he had fleas. Five times he had been to the palace, and the once they would see him, it was to say they were too busy for him and send him away like an errand boy. It all added up to one thing. They thought he would interfere with whatever they were up to, and the only reason he would do that was if they were putting themselves in danger. They were not complete fools; idiots often, but not complete fools. If they saw danger, there was danger. Some places in this city, being a stranger or showing a coin could bring a knife in your ribs, and not even channeling would stop it if they did not see in time. And here he was, with Nalesean and a dozen good men from the Band, not to mention Thom and Juilin, who actually had rooms in the servants’ quarters of the palace, all left to twiddle their thumbs. Those thick-skulled women were going to get their throats cut yet. “Not if I can help it,” he growled. “What?” Nalesean said. “Look. They’re lining up, Mat. The Light burn my soul, I hope you’re right. That piebald doesn’t look half-crazed to me; he looks eager.”
The horses were prancing, taking their places between tall poles stuck in the ground, with streamers tailing from the tops of them in a warm breeze, blue and green and every color, some striped. Five hundred paces down the track of hard-beaten red clay an identical number of streamered poles made another row. Each rider had to round the same-colored streamer as floated to his right at the start and then return. A booker stood at either end of the line of horses, just to the front, a round woman and a rounder man, each with a white scarf held overhead. The bookers took turns at this, and were not allowed to accept wagers on a race they started.
“Burn me,” Nalesean muttered. “Light, man, be easy. You’ll tickle your seamstress under the chin yet.” A roar drowned the last word as the scarves came down, and the horses surged forward, even the sound of their hooves submerged in the noise of the crowd. In ten strides Wind had the lead, Olver lying close on his neck, with the silver-maned dun only a head back. The piebald trailed in the pack, where the riders’ switches already rose and fell frantically.
“I told you the dun was dangerous,” Nalesean moaned. “We shouldn’t have wagered everything.”
Mat did not bother to answer. He had another purse in his pocket and loose coins besides. He called the purse his seed; with that, with even a few of the coins in it, and a game of dice, he could repair his fortunes whatever happened this morning. Halfway down the course, Wind still held the lead, the dun clinging close a full length ahead of the next horse. The piebald was running fifth. After the turn would come the hazard; boys on trailing animals were known to slash at those who rounded the stakes ahead of them.
Following the horses, Mat’s eyes swept across the sharp-faced woman again . . . and snapped back. The shouts and screams of the crowd faded. The woman was shaking her fan at the horses and jumping excitedly, but suddenly he saw her in pale green and a rich gray cloak, her hair caught in a frothy net of lace, skirts held up delicately as she picked her way across a stable not far from Caemlyn.
Rand still lay there moaning in the straw, even if the fever seemed gone; at least he was not shouting anymore at people who were not there. Mat eyed the woman suspiciously as she knelt beside Rand. Maybe she could help as she claimed, but Mat did not trust as he once had. What was a fine lady like this doing in a village stable? Caressing the ruby-tipped hilt of the dagger hidden by his coat, he wondered why he had ever trusted. It never paid. Never.
“. . . weak as a day-old kitten,” she was saying as she reached beneath her cloak. “I think. . . .”
A knife appeared in her hand so suddenly, streaking for Mat’s throat, that he would have been dead if he had not been ready. Dropping flat, he seized her wrist, just pushing it away from him, the curved Shadar Logoth blade sweeping out to lie against her slim white neck. The woman froze, trying to look down at the sharp edge dimpling her skin. He wanted to slice. Especially when he saw where her own dagger had stabbed into the stable wall. Around the slim blade a black circle of char grew, and a thin gray tendril of smoke rose from wood about to burst into flame.
Shivering, Mat rubbed a hand across his eyes. Just carrying that Shadar Logoth knife had nearly killed him, eating those holes in his memories, but how could he forget a woman who tried to kill him? A Darkfriend—she had admitted as much—who tried to kill him with a dagger that set a bucket of water near boiling when they tossed it in after securing her in the tackroom. A Darkfriend who had been hunting Rand and him. What chance she was in Ebou Dar when he was, at the races on the same day? Ta’veren might be the answer—he liked thinking of that about as much he did the Horn of bloody Valere—but the fact was, the Forsaken knew his name. That stable had not been the last time Darkfriends tried putting an end to Mat Cauthon.
He staggered as Nalesean suddenly began pounding his back. “Look at him, Mat! Light of heaven, look at him!”
The horses had rounded the far poles and were well on their way back. Head stretched out, mane and tail flying behind, Wind streaked down the course with Olver clinging to his back like a part of the saddle. The boy rode as if he had been born there. Four lengths behind, the piebald pounded furiously, rider working his switch in a futile effort to close. Just like that they slashed across the finish line, with the next nearest horse another three lengths back. The white-maned dun came last. The moans and mutters of losing bettors overwhelmed the shouts of winners. Losing tokens made a shower of white onto the track, and dozens of the bookers’ servants rushed out to clear them away before the next race. “We have to find that woman, Mat. I’d not put it past her to run off without paying out so much as she owes us.” From what Mat had heard, the bookers’ guild was more than harsh the first time one of its members tried anything of the sort, and deadly the second, but they were commoners, and that was enough for Nalesean.
“She’s standing right over there in plain view.” Mat gestured without taking his eyes from the fox-faced Darkfriend. Glaring at a token, she hurled it to the ground, and even lifted her skirts to stamp on it. Plainly not a wager on Wind. Still grimacing, she began threading her way through the crowd. Mat stiffened. She was leaving. “Gather our winnings, Nalesean, then take Olver back to the inn. If he misses his reading lesson, you’ll kiss the Dark One’s sister before Mistress Anan lets him out for another race.”
“Where are you going?”
“I saw a woman who tried to kill me,” Mat said over his shoulder.
“Give her a trinke
t next time,” Nalesean shouted after him. Following the woman was no trouble, with that white-plumed hat for a banner bobbing through the crowd on the other side. The earthen banks gave way to a large open area where brightly lacquered coaches and sedan chairs waited under the watchful eyes of drivers and bearers. Mat’s horse Pips was one of scores being guarded by members of the Ancient and Worshipful Guild of Stablemen. There was a guild for most things in Ebou Dar, and woe to anyone who trespassed on their ground. He paused, but she walked on by the conveyances that had brought those with position or money. No maid, and now not even a chair. No one walked in this heat who had money to ride. Had my Lady come on hard times?
The Silver Circuit lay just south of the tall white-plastered city wall, and she strolled up the hundred paces or so of road to the broad pointed arch of the Moldine Gate and in. Trying to appear casual, Mat followed. The gateway was ten spans of dim tunnel, but her hat stood out among the folk passing through. People who had to walk seldom wore plumes. She seemed to know where she was going on the other side. The plumes wove through the crowds ahead of him, unhurried but always moving forward.
Ebou Dar shone white in the morning sun. White palaces with white columns and screened wrought-iron balconies cheek-by-jowl with white-plastered weavers’ shops and fishmongers and stables, great white houses with louvered shutters hiding their arched windows beside white inns with painted signs hanging in front and open markets under long roofs where live sheep and chickens, calves and geese and ducks made a barnyard din alongside their fellows already butchered and hanging. All white, stone or plaster, except here and there bands of red or blue or gold on turnip-shaped domes and pointed spires that had balconies running around them. There were squares everywhere, always with a statue larger than life on a pedestal or a splashing fountain that only emphasized the heat, always packed with people. Refugees filled the city, and merchants and traders of every sort. Never a trouble but brought profit to somebody. What Saldaea had once sent into Arad Doman now came downriver to Ebou Dar, and so did what Amadicia had traded into Tarabon. Everyone scurried, for a coin or a thousand, for a bite to eat today. The aroma that hung in the air was equal parts perfume, dust and sweat. Somehow, it all smelled desperate.
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