The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  The uncarved door to the hall creaked open—most of Algarin’s servants were nearly as old as he, and though they kept everything dusted and neat, the lamps topped with oil and the wicks trimmed, hinges in the manor seemed to escape regular oiling—the door creaked open to admit Verin, still dressed for a journey in simple brown wool with divided skirts and carrying her cloak over her arm, still patting her gray-streaked hair into place. The stout little sister’s square face wore a vexed expression, and she was shaking her head. “Well, the Sea Folk are delivered to Tear, Cadsuane. I didn’t go near the Stone, but I heard that High Lord Astoril stopped complaining about his creaking joints and mustered inside with Darlin. Who’d have thought Astoril would stir himself, and on Darlin’s side? The streets are full of armsmen, most getting drunk and picking fights with each other when they’re not fighting Atha’an Miere. There are as many Sea Folk in the city as everyone else put together. Harine was aghast. She went rushing out to the ships as soon as she could hire a boat, expecting to be declared Mistress of the Ships and set everything to rights. There seems no doubt that Nesta din Reas is dead.”

  Cadsuane was content to let the round little woman chatter on. Verin was not nearly so vague as she pretended. Some Browns really were capable of tripping over their own feet from not noticing them, but Verin was one of those who wore an assumed cloak of unworldliness. She seemed to believe that Cadsuane accepted the cloak for reality, yet if there was a point to be made, she would make it. And what she left out might be revealing, too. Cadsuane was less sure of the other sister than she might have wished. Uncertainty was a fact of life, but she was uncertain about entirely too many things to suit her.

  Unfortunately, Min must have been listening at the door, and that young woman had little patience. “I told Harine it wouldn’t be like that,” she protested, bursting into the room. “I told her she’d be punished for the bargain she made with Rand. Only after that will she become Mistress of the Ships, and I can’t say if it will be ten days from now or ten years.” Slim and pretty, and tall in her red-heeled boots, with dark ringlets hanging to her shoulders, Min had a low womanly voice, but she wore a boy’s red coat and blue breeches. The coat was embroidered with colorful flowers on the lapels and up the sleeves, and the breeches in bands down the outsides of the legs, but they were still coat and breeches.

  “You may come in, Min,” Cadsuane said quietly. It was a tone that usually made people sit up and take notice. Those who knew her at all, anyway. Spots of color appeared in Min’s cheeks. “The Wavemistress has already learned all she is going to from your viewing, I fear. But from your urgency, perhaps you’ve read someone else’s auras and wish to tell me what you saw?” The girl’s peculiar ability had proved helpful in the past and doubtless could again. Perhaps. As far as Cadsuane could tell, she did not lie about what she saw in the images and auras that she perceived floating around people, but she was not always forthcoming, either. Particularly not when it came to the one person Cadsuane would have liked to know about above all others.

  Red cheeks or no red cheeks, Min raised her chin stubbornly. She had changed since Shadar Logoth, or perhaps it had begun earlier, but either way, the change was not for the better. “Rand wants you to come see him. He said to ask, so you needn’t get snippy over it.”

  Cadsuane merely looked at her and let the silence stretch. Snippy? Definitely not for the better. “Tell him I will come when I am able,” she said finally. “Close the door firmly behind you, Min.” The young woman opened her mouth as if to say something more, but at least she retained sense enough to leave it unsaid. She even made a passable curtsy, in spite of those ridiculous boots, and shut the door firmly behind her. Just barely short of slamming it, in fact.

  Verin shook her head again, giving a laugh that sounded only slightly amused. “She’s in love with the young man, Cadsuane, and she’s tucked her heart in his pocket. She’ll follow that before her head, whatever you say or do. I think she’s afraid he almost died on her, and you know how that can make a woman determined to hang on.”

  Cadsuane’s lips thinned. Verin knew more about that sort of relations with men than she did—she had never believed in indulging with her own Warders, as some Greens did, and other men had always been out of the question—but the Brown had hit close to a truth without knowing. At least, Cadsuane did not think the other sister knew Min was bonded to the al’Thor boy. She herself only knew because the girl had let too much slip in a careless moment. Even the tightest mussel eventually yielded its meat once you got that first small crack in the shell. Sometimes it gave up an unexpected pearl, as well. Yes, Min would want to keep the lad alive whether she loved him or not, but no more than Cadsuane did.

  Draping her cloak on the tall back of a chair, Verin moved to the nearest fireplace and stretched out her hands to warm them in front of the low flames. You could not say that Verin glided, but she was more graceful than her bulk suggested. How much of her was deception? Every Aes Sedai hid behind various masks, over time. It became habit after a while. “I believe the situation in Tear may be resolved peacefully yet,” she said, peering into the fire. She might have been talking to herself. Or wanted Cadsuane to think it. “Hearne and Simaan are growing quite desperate, afraid the other High Lords will return from Illian and trap them in the city. They may be amenable to accepting Darlin, given their other choices. Estanda is made of sterner stuff, but if she can be convinced there’s advantage for her in it—”

  “I told you not to go near them,” Cadsuane broke in sternly.

  The stout woman blinked at her in surprise. “I didn’t. The streets are always full of rumors, and I do know how to piece rumors together and sift out a little truth. I did see Alanna and Rafela, but I ducked behind a fellow hawking meat pies from a barrow before they saw me. I’m sure they didn’t.” She paused, clearly waiting for Cadsuane to explain why she had been told to avoid the sisters as well.

  “I have to go to the boy now, Verin,” Cadsuane said instead. That was the trouble with agreeing to advise someone. Even when you managed to set all the conditions you could wish for—most of them, anyway—you still had to come sooner or later when they called. Eventually. But it did give her a reason to evade Verin’s curiosity. The answer was simple. If you tried to solve every problem yourself, you ended by solving none. And with some problems, how they were solved really did not matter in the long run. But not answering left Verin with a puzzle to ponder, a little butter for her paws. When Cadsuane was unsure of someone, she wanted them unsure of her, too.

  Verin gathered up her cloak and left the room with her. Did the other woman mean to accompany her? But outside the sitting room, they encountered Nesune walking briskly down the hall. She came to a sudden halt. No more than a handful of people had ever managed to ignore Cadsuane, yet Nesune did a credible job, her nearly black eyes latching on to Verin.

  “You’re back then, are you?” The best of Browns did have a way of stating the obvious. “You wrote a paper on animals of the Drowned Lands, as I recall.” Which meant that Verin had; Nesune recalled everything she had ever seen—a useful skill, if Cadsuane had been sure enough of her to make use of it. “Lord Algarin showed me the skin of a large snake he claims came from the Drowned Lands, but I’m convinced it is the same as I observed. . . .” Verin glanced helplessly at Cadsuane over her shoulder as the taller woman drew her away by her sleeve, but before they were three steps along the corridor, she was deep in discussion over this fool snake.

  It was a remarkable sight, and troubling in a way. Nesune was loyal to Elaida, or had been, while Verin was one of those who wanted to pull Elaida down. Or had been. Now they talked amiably about snakes. That both had sworn fealty to the al’Thor boy could be laid to his being ta’veren, winding the Pattern around himself unconsciously, but was that oath sufficient to make them ignore their opposition over who held the Amyrlin Seat? Or were they affected by having a ta’veren in close proximity? She would have liked very much to know that. None of her orn
aments protected against ta’veren. Of course, she did not know what two of the fish and one of the moons did, but it seemed unlikely they did that. It could have been as simple as Verin and Nesune both being Brown. Browns could forget everything else when they settled to study something. Snakes. Phaw! The small ornaments swayed as she shook her head before turning away, having the two receding Browns behind. What did the boy want? She had never liked being an advisor, necessary or not.

  Drafts along the corridors rippled the few tapestries on the walls, all in old styles and showing the wear of having been taken down and rehung many times. The manor house had grown like a rambling farmhouse rather than being built large, with additions added whenever the family’s fortunes and numbers waxed. House Pendaloan had never been wealthy, but there had been times they were numerous. The results showed in more than worn, old-fashioned wall hangings. The cornices were brightly painted, red or blue or yellow, but the hallways varied in width and height, and sometimes met at a slight skew. Windows that once had looked to the fields now looked down on courtyards, usually bare except for a few benches and placed purely to provide light. Sometimes there was no choice in getting from here to there except to take a roofed colonnade overlooking one of those courtyards. The columns were wooden more often than not, though bravely painted even where not carved.

  On one of those walkways, with fat green columns, two sisters were standing together watching the activity in the courtyard below. At least, they were watching together when Cadsuane opened the door to the colonnade. Beldeine saw her step out, and stiffened, twitching at the green-fringed shawl she had worn fewer than five years. Pretty, with her high cheekbones and a slight tilt to her brown eyes, she had not yet achieved agelessness, and looked younger than Min, particularly when she shot Cadsuane a frosty stare and hurried from the colonnade in the other direction.

  Merise, her companion, smiled after her in amusement, shifting her own green-fringed shawl slightly. Tall and usually quite serious, with her hair drawn back tightly from her pale face, Merise was not a woman who smiled often. “Beldeine, she is becoming concerned that she has no Warder yet,” she said in the accents of Tarabon as Cadsuane stopped beside her, though her blue eyes returned to the courtyard. “She seems to be considering an Asha’man, if she can find one. I told her to talk to Daigian. If it does not help her, it will help Daigian.”

  All of the Warders they had with them were gathered in the stone-paved yard, in their shirtsleeves despite the cold, most seated on painted wooden benches watching two of their number work with wooden practice swords. Jahar, one of Merise’s three, was a pretty, sun-dark young man. The silver bells fastened to the ends of his two long braids chimed with the fury of his attack. He moved like a striking blacklance. Not a breath of breeze stirred, but the eight-pointed star, like a golden compass rose, seemed to shift against Cadsuane’s hair. Had it been held in her hand, she could have felt it vibrating clearly. But then, she already knew that Jahar was an Asha’man, and the star would not have pointed him out, merely told her that a man who could channel was nearby. The more men who could channel, the harder the star quivered, she had learned. Jahar’s opponent, a very tall, broad-shouldered fellow with a stone face and a braided leather cord around his graying temples to hold back shoulder-length hair, was not the second Asha’man down there, but he was as deadly in his own way. Lan did not really seem to move that fast, but he . . . flowed. His blade of bundled laths was always there to deflect Jahar’s, always moving the younger man just a touch more out of his line.

  Suddenly, Lan’s wooden blade struck Jahar’s side with a resounding crack, a killing blow given with steel. While the younger man was still flinching from the force of the strike, Lan flowed back into a ready stance, long blade upright in his hands. Nethan, another of Merise’s, rose to his feet, a lean fellow with wings of white at his temples and tall, if still a hand or more shorter than Lan. Jahar waved him away and raised his practice blade again, loudly demanding another go.

  “Is Daigian still bearing up?” Cadsuane asked.

  “Better than I expected,” Merise admitted. “She stays in her room too much, but she keeps her weeping private.” Her gaze shifted from the men dancing their swords to a green-painted bench where Verin’s stocky gray-haired Tomas sat next to a grizzled fellow with only a fringe of white hair remaining. “Damer, he wanted to try his Healing on her, but Daigian refused. She may never have had a Warder before, but she knows that the grieving over a dead Warder is part of remembering him. I am surprised that Corele would consider allowing it.”

  With a shake of her head, the Taraboner sister returned to studying Jahar. Other sisters’ Warders did not really interest her, at least not like her own. “Asha’man, they grieve as Warders do. I thought perhaps Jahar and Damer merely followed the lead of the others, but Jahar, he says it is their way, too. I did not intrude, of course, but I watched them drink in memory of Daigian’s young Eben. They never mentioned his name, but they had a full winecup sitting for him. Bassane and Nethan, they know they can die on any day, and they accept that. Jahar expects to die; every day he expects it. To him, every hour is most assuredly his last.”

  Cadsuane barely refrained from glancing at the other woman. Merise did not often go on at such length. The other woman’s face was smooth, her manner unruffled, but something had upset her. “I know you practice linking with him,” she said delicately, peering down into the courtyard. Delicacy was required in talking to another sister about her Warder. That was part of the reason she stared into the courtyard, frowning. “Have you decided yet whether the al’Thor boy succeeded at Shadar Logoth? Did he really manage to cleanse the male half of the Source?”

  Corele practiced linking with Damer, too, but the Yellow was so focused on her futile efforts to reason out how to do with saidar what he did with saidin that she would not have noticed the Dark One’s taint sliding down her throat. A pity she herself had not come to the shawl fifty years later than she had, or she would have bonded one of the men herself and had no need to ask. But fifty years would have meant that Norla died in her little house in the Black Hills before Cadsuane Melaidhrin ever went to the White Tower. That would have altered a great deal of history. For one thing, it would have been unlikely that she would be in anything approaching her present circumstances. So she asked, delicately, and waited.

  Merise was quiet, and still, for a long moment, and then she sighed. “I do not know, Cadsuane. Saidar is a calm ocean that will take you wherever you want so long as you know the currents and let them carry you. Saidin . . . An avalanche of burning stone. Collapsing mountains of ice. It feels cleaner than when I first linked with Jahar, but anything could hide in that chaos. Anything.”

  Cadsuane nodded. She was not sure she had expected any other answer. Why should she find any certainty about one of the two most important questions in the world when she could find none on so many simpler matters? In the courtyard, Lan’s wooden blade stopped, not with a crack this time, just touching Jahar’s throat, and the bigger man flowed back to his waiting stance. Nethan stood again, and again Jahar waved him back, angrily raising his sword and setting himself. Merise’s third, Bassane, a short wide fellow nearly as sun-dark as Jahar for all he was Cairhienin, laughed and made a rude comment about over-ambitious men tripping on their own blades. Tomas and Damer exchanged glances and shook their heads; men of that age usually had given up taunting long ago. The clack of wood on wood began once more.

  The other four Warders were not the only audience for Lan and Jahar in the courtyard. The slim girl with her dark hair in a long braid, watching anxiously from a red bench, was the focus of Cadsuane’s frown. The child would need to flash her Great Serpent ring under people’s noses to be taken for Aes Sedai, which she was, if just technically. It was not only because Nynaeve’s face was a girl’s face; Beldeine still seemed as young. Nynaeve bounced on the bench, always on the point of leaping up. Occasionally her mouth moved as if she were silently shouting encouragement, and som
etimes her hands twisted as though demonstrating how Lan should have moved his sword. A frivolous girl, full of passions, who only rarely demonstrated that she had a brain. Min was not the only one to have thrown her heart and head both down the well over a man. By the customs of dead Malkier, the red dot painted on Nynaeve’s forehead indicated her marriage to Lan, though Yellows seldom married their Warders. Very few sisters did, for that matter. And of course, Lan was not Nynaeve’s Warder, however much he and the girl pretended otherwise. Who he did belong to was a matter they evaded like thieves slipping through the night.

  More interesting, more disturbing, was the jewelry Nynaeve wore, a long gold necklace and slim gold belt, with matching bracelets and finger rings, the gaudy red and green and blue gems that studded them clashing with her yellow-slashed dress. And she wore that peculiar piece as well, on her left hand, golden rings attached to a golden bracelet by flat chains. That was an angreal, much stronger than Cadsuane’s shrike hair ornament. The others were much like her own decorations, too, ter’angreal and plainly made at the same time, during the Breaking of the World, when an Aes Sedai might find many hands turned against her, most especially those of men who could channel. Strange to think that they had been called Aes Sedai, too. It would be like meeting a man called Cadsuane.

  The question—her morning seemed filled with questions, and the sun not halfway to noon yet—the question was, did the girl wear her jewelry because of the al’Thor boy, or the Asha’man? Or because of Cadsuane Melaidhrin? Nynaeve had demonstrated her loyalty to a young man from her own village, and she had shown her wariness of him as well. She did have a brain, when she chose to use it. Until that question was answered, however, trusting the girl too far was dangerous. The trouble was, little these days did not seem dangerous.