Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time 6) - Page 53

Rand missed a step. That was the first time today that Lews Therin’s voice had spoken inside his head — and too much like a comment on his thoughts of Aes Sedai for comfort — but it was not what made him swallow what he had been going to say and stop dead.

Because of the heat the doors stood open, giving out into one of the Palace gardens. The flowers were gone, and some of the rose and whitestar bushes looked wilted, but the shade trees still stood, if with few leaves, around the white marble fountain that splashed in the garden’s heart. A woman in bulky brown wool skirts and a loose white algode blouse stood beside the fountain, a gray shawl looped over her arms, staring in wonder as she often did at water with no use except to be looked at. Rand’s eyes drank in the lines of Aviendha’s face, the waves of reddish hair falling to her shoulders from the folded gray scarf fastened around her temples. Light but she was beautiful. Studying the spray of water, she had not seen him yet.

Did he love her? He did not know. She was all tangled in his head and his dreams with Elayne, and even Min. What he did know was that he was dangerous; he had nothing to offer any woman except pain.

Ilyena, Lews Therin wept. I killed her! The Light consume me forever!

“A pair of Aes Sedai showing up like that might be important,” Ran

d said quietly. “I think I should visit this inn and see why they’re here.” Almost everyone stopped when he did, but Enaila and Jalani exchanged glances and kept on right past him toward the garden. He raised his voice a fraction and hardened it considerably more. “The Maidens here will come with me. Anyone who wants to put on a dress and discuss matchmaking can stay behind.”

Enaila and Jalani stiffened and spun to face him, indignation lighting their eyes. A good thing Somara was not in today’s guard; she might have gone on anyway. Sulin’s fingers flashed in Maiden handtalk, and whatever she had to say, it quenched indignation and set embarrassed flames in the two Maidens’ cheeks instead. The Aiel had all sorts of hand signals for when silence was best. Every clan had its private set, and every society as well, besides which there were those all the Aiel knew, but only the Maidens had made a language of them.

Rand did not wait for Sulin to finish before turning away from the garden. These Aes Sedai might leave Caemlyn as quickly as they had come. He glanced over his shoulder. Aviendha was still staring at the water; she had not seen him. He quickened his step. “Bashere, would you send one of your men to have horses readied? At the South Stable Gate.” The main gates of the Palace opened onto the Queen’s Plaza, which would be full of people hoping for a glimpse of him. It would have taken half an hour to make a way through, if he was lucky.

Bashere motioned, and one of the younger Saldaeans loped ahead in that rolling stride of a man more used to a saddle. “A man must know when to retreat from a woman,” Bashere said to the air, “but a wise man knows that sometimes he must stand and face her.”

“Young men,” Bael said indulgently. “A young man chases shadows and runs from moonlight, and in the end he stabs himself in the foot with his own spear.” Some of the other Aiel chuckled, Maidens and Knife Hands alike. The older ones did.

Irritated, Rand looked over his shoulder again. “Neither of you would look well in a dress.” Surprisingly, the Maidens and Knife Hands laughed again, more loudly. Maybe he was getting a grip on Aiel humor.

It was as he expected when he rode out of the South Stable Gate into one of the Inner City’s curving streets. Jeade’en’s hooves rang on the paving stones as the stallion frisked; the dapple seldom got out of the stable of late. There were plenty of people in the street, but nowhere near the numbers to be expected on the other side of the palace and all going about their own business. Even so, fingers pointed, and people leaned close to one another, murmuring. Some might have recognized Bashere — unlike Rand, he had been out and about in the city often — but anybody emerging from the Palace, especially with an escort of trotting Aiel, had to be important. The murmurs and pointing fingers followed.

Despite the stares, Rand tried to enjoy the beauties of the Ogier-built Inner City. The few occasions he found to just enjoy anything were precious. Streets curved out from the shining white Royal Palace, flowing along the contours of the hills like a part of the land. Everywhere stood slender towers covered in colored tiles, or domes of gold or purple or white, sparkling in the sunlight. Here a line of sight had been left clear to give a view of tree-filled park, there a rise threw the eyes across the city to the rolling plains and forests beyond the tall silver-streaked white wall that enclosed all of Caemlyn. The Inner City had been laid out to delight and soothe the eye. According to the Ogier, only Tar Valon itself and storied Manetheren had ever surpassed it, and many humans, Andorans foremost among them, believed that Caemlyn matched either.

The pure white walls of the Inner City marked the beginning of the surrounding New City, with its own domes and spires, some trying to match the height of those in the Inner City on its higher hills. Here the narrower streets were packed full of humanity, and even the broad boulevards, split down the middle by tree-lined expanses, were filled with people and ox-carts and horse-drawn wagons, folk on horseback and in carriages and sedan chairs. A buzz hung in the air, as from a huge hive of bees.

Passage was slower here, though the crowds gave way. They did not know who he was any more than did those in the Inner City, but no one wanted to get in the way of striding Aiel. It simply took time with so many people. And there was every sort of person. Farmers in rough woolens and merchants in coats or dresses of finer cut. Craftsmen hurrying about their trades and hawkers crying their wares from trays and pushcarts, everything from pins and ribbons to fruit and fireworks, the last two equally dear now. A gleeman in his patch-covered cloak rubbed shoulders with three Aiel inspecting the blades displayed on tables before a cutler’s workshop. Two lean fellows with their dark hair in braids and swords on their backs — Hunters for the Horn, Rand expected — stood chatting with a number of Saldaeans as they listened to a woman playing the flute and a man the tambour on a street corner. Cairhienin, shorter and paler, stood out among the Andorans, and so did the darker Tairens, but Rand saw Murandians in long coats and Altarans in elaborate vests, fork-bearded Kandori, even a pair of Domani with long thin mustaches and earrings.

Another sort of people stood out too, those who wandered about in rumpled coats and wrinkled dresses, often dusty and always blinking and staring, plainly with nowhere to go and no idea of what to do next. That sort had gone as far as they could toward what they sought. Him. The Dragon Reborn. What he was to do with them he had no notion, yet they were his responsibility, one way or another. No matter that he had not asked them to throw over their lives, had not wanted them to abandon everything. They had. Because of him. And if they learned who he was, they might well overwhelm the Aiel and tear him apart in their eagerness just to touch him.

He touched the fat-little-man angreal in his coat pocket. A fine thing, if it came to him using the One Power to protect himself against people who had given up everything because of him. That was why he seldom ventured into the city. One reason, anyway. There was just too much to be done to go for an idle ride.

The inn Bael led him to, toward the western end of the city, was called Culain’s Hound, three stories of stone with a red tile roof. On the twisting side street, the passing throng backed up both ways, narrowing to crowd around Rand’s party when it stopped. Rand touched the angreal again — two Aes Sedai; he should be able to handle them without resorting to that — before dismounting and going in. Not before three Maidens and a pair of Knife Hands, of course, all on their toes and a hair from veiling. He could have taught a cat to sing first. Leaving two Saldaeans with the horses, Bashere and the others strode in at his heels along with Bael, the rest of the Aiel following except for those who had taken up guard outside. What they found was not what Rand expected.

The common room could have changed places with any of a hundred or more in Caemlyn, great barrels of ale and wine lining one plain plastered wall, topped with smaller casks of brandy, and a gray-striped cat sprawled on top of all, a pair of stone fireplaces, the hearths swept bare, and three or four aproned serving women moving among tables and benches scattered around a bare wooden floor beneath a beamed ceiling. The innkeeper, a round-faced man with three chins, a white apron straining around his bulk, trotted up washing his hands and eyeing the Aiel only a touch nervously. Caemlyn had learned they were not going to pillage and burn everything in sight — convincing the Aiel that Andor was not a conquered land and they could not take the fifth had been a harder proposition — but that was not to say innkeepers were used to having two dozen appear in their common rooms at once.

The innkeeper concentrated on Rand and Bashere. Mainly on Bashere. Both were clearly men of substance by their clothes, but Bashere was the elder by a good many years and thus likely to be the more important, “Welcome, my Lord, my Lords. What may I offer you? I have wines from Murandy as well as Andoran, brandy from . . . “

Rand ignored the man. What was not like a hundred other common rooms was the patrons. At this hour he would have expected one or two men perhaps, but there were none. Instead most of the tables were filled with plainly dressed young women, girls really for the most part, who twisted around on their benches, te

acups in hand, to gawk at the new arrivals. More than one gasped at Bael’s height. Not all of them stared at the Aiel, though, and it was the near dozen who gaped at him that made Rand’s eyes widen. He knew them. Not all well, but he did know them. One in particular seized his attention.

“Bode?” he said in disbelief. That big-eyed girl staring at him — when had she gotten old enough to put her hair in a braid? — was Bodewhin Cauthon, Mat’s sister. And there was plump Hilde Barran sitting next to skinny Jerilin al’Caar, and pretty Marisa Ahan, with her hands clapped to her cheeks the way she always did when surprised, and buxom Emry Lewin and Elise Marwin and Darea Candwin and . . . They were from Emond’s Field, or close by. Darting a look over the rest of the tables, he realized the others must be Two Rivers girls, too. Most of them, anyway — he saw a Domani face, and one or two more that might well be from off — but every dress could have been seen any day on the Green in Emond’s Field. “What under the Light are you doing here?”

“We are on our way to Tar Valon,” Bode managed despite gaping. The only thing about her that looked at all like Mat was a mischievous something around the eyes. Her astonishment at seeing him vanished quickly in a broad smile of wonder and delight. “To become Aes Sedai, like Egwene and Nynaeve.”

“We could ask the same of you,” willowy Larine Ayellin put in, arranging her thick braid over her shoulder with studied casualness. The oldest of the Emond’s Field girls — a good three years younger than him, but the only one besides Bode to have her hair braided — she had always had a good opinion of herself. She was pretty enough for all the boys to have confirmed it for her. “Lord Perrin hardly said two words about you except to say you were off having adventures. And wearing fine coats, which I see you are.”

“Is Mat well?” Bode asked, suddenly anxious. “Is he with you? Mother worries about him so. He wouldn’t even remember to put on clean stockings if someone didn’t tell him.”

“No,” Rand said slowly, “he’s not here. But he’s well.”

“We hardly expected to find you in Caemlyn,” Jancy Torfinn piped up in her high voice. She could not be more than fourteen; she was the youngest, at least among the Emond’s Fielders. “Verin Sedai and Alanna Sedai will be pleased, I’ll wager. They’re always asking what we know about you.”

So those were the two Aes Sedai. He knew Verin, a Brown sister, more than slightly. He did not know what to think about her being here, though. That was hardly most important anyway. These girls were from home. “Everything is all right in the Two Rivers, then? In Emond’s Field? Perrin got there all right, it seems. Wait! Lord Perrin?”

That opened the sluice gate. The rest of the Two Rivers girls were more interested in studying the Aiel with sidelong peeks, especially Bael, and a few spared glances for the Saldaeans, but the Emond’s Field girls crowded around Rand, all trying to tell him everything at once, all jumbled up and wrong way round, interspersed with questions about himself and Mat, about Egwene and Nynaeve, most of which he could not have answered in under an hour had they given him a chance.

Tags: Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time Fantasy
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