“The Stone?” he said blandly. “Yes, I remember the Stone. A fine time we all had there. Do you remember something in the Stone that gives you a right to make demands of me? I don’t. I am just here to keep you and Nynaeve from getting holes poked in your hides in Ebou Dar. You can ask Rand about ter’angreal after I deliver you to him.”
For a long moment she stared at him as though meaning to beat him down by force of will, then turned on her heel without another word. He followed her back to the camp and was surprised to see her walk along the line of hobbled horses. She examined the fires and how the blankets were laid out, shook her head over the remains of the troopers’ meal. He had no idea what she was about until she returned to him with her chin raised.
“Your men have done very well, Master Cauthon,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “In general I am more than satisfied. But if you had planned ahead properly, they would not have had to gorge themselves on foods that will at the very least keep them awake tonight. Still, on the whole, you have done well. I’m sure you will think ahead in future.” Cool as you please she strode back to her own fire before he could say a word, leaving him staring.
Had that been the whole of it, though, the bloody Daughter-Heir thinking he was one of her subjects, and her and Nynaeve tight-lipped around Vandene and Adeleas — had that been all, he would have danced a jig. Right after Elayne’s “inspection,” before he could even reach his blankets, the foxhead went cold.
He was so shocked that he stood there staring down at his chest before he even thought to look toward the Aes Sedai’s fire. There they stood in a row along that unseen dividing line, Aviendha as well. Elayne murmured something he could not make out and the two white-haired Aes Sedai nodded, Adeleas all the while hastily dipping a pen in an inkjar in a sort of scabbard at her belt and jotting notes in a small book. Nynaeve was tugging her braid and muttering to herself.
It only lasted a few moments altogether. Then the chill faded, and they returned to their fire talking softly among themselves. Now and then one of them would glance in his direction until he finally bedded himself down.
The second day they joined a road, and Jaem put his color-shifting cloak away. It was a broad stretch of hard-packed dirt where sometimes an edge of old paving stone still showed, but the highway did not make travel that much faster. For one thing, it curved through increasingly hilly forest. Some of those hills deserved the name of small mountain at least, ja
gged things with sheer cliffs and stony spires sticking up through the trees. For another, a thin yet steady stream of people drifted in both directions, mostly clumps of grubby blank-faced folk who barely seemed to have sense to step out of the way of a farmer’s high-wheeled ox-cart, much less a merchant’s train with its canvas-topped wagons clipping along behind teams of six or eight horses. Farmhouses and barns of pale stone appeared clinging to the slopes of the hills, and midway through the third day, they saw the first village of white-plastered buildings with flat roofs of pale reddish tile.
The pinpricks kept up, though. Elayne continued her evening inspections. When he told her sarcastically that he was glad she was pleased, in the second night’s camp beside the road, she smiled one of those deliberate regal smiles and said, “You should be, Master Cauthon,” sounding as if he had meant every word!
Once they began stopping at inns, she inspected the horses in the stables and the troopers’ sleeping places in the lofts. Asking her not to brought a coolly arched eyebrow and no answer. Telling her not to brought not even the eyebrow; she just plain ignored him altogether. She told him to do things he had already decided to do — such as having all the horses’ shoes checked at the first inn that had a farrier — and, more grating, things he would have seen to had he known of them before her. How she discovered Tad Kandel was trying to hide a boil on his bottom, Mat did not know, or that Lawdrin Mendair had no fewer than five flasks of brandy secreted in his saddlebags. Irritating did not begin to describe doing a thing after she told him to, but Kandel’s boil had to be lanced — some of the Band had adopted Mat’s attitude toward being Healed — and Mendair’s brandy poured out, and a dozen things more.
Mat almost prayed for her to tell him to do something that did not need doing, just once, so he could tell her no. Emphatically, absolutely, no! Another demand for the ter’angreal would have been perfect, but she never mentioned it again. He explained to the troopers that they had no obligation to obey her, and he never actually caught one at it, but they began grinning in a pleased way at her compliments on how well they cared for their horses and puffed out their chests when she told them they looked like good soldiers to her. The day Mat saw Vanin knuckle his forehead to her, heard him murmur, “Thank you, my Lady,” without a trace of irony, that day Mat nearly swallowed his tongue.
He tried to be pleasant, but none of the women were having any, not just Elayne. Aviendha told him that he had no honor, of all things, and if he could not show more respect to Elayne, she herself would undertake to teach him respect. Aviendha! The woman he still suspected was waiting her chance to slit Elayne’s throat! She called Elayne her near-sister! Vandene and Adeleas peered at him as if he were a strange bug pinned to a board. He offered to shoot with the Hunter for coin or the fun of it — the bow she carried must have fevered her imagination; her name as a Hunter was Birgitte — but she just gave him a very odd look and declined. For that matter, she stayed clear of him after that. She stuck to Elayne’s side like a burr except when Elayne came near him. And Nynaeve . . .
All the way from Salidar she avoided him as if he smelled bad. Their third night on the way, the first at an inn, a little place called The Marriage Knife, Mat saw her in the tile-roofed stable feeding a wizened carrot to her plump mare and decided that whatever else was going on, he could at least talk to her about Bode. It was not every day a man’s sister went off to become Aes Sedai, and Nynaeve would know what Bode was facing. “Nynaeve,” he said, striding toward her, “I want to talk to you —” He got no further.
She practically leaped straight up in the air, and came down shaking a fist at him, though she immediately hid it in a fold of her skirts. “You leave me alone, Mat Cauthon,” she all but shouted. “Do you hear me? You leave me alone!” And she scurried out, sidling past him and bristling so that he expected to see her braid stand up like a cat’s tail. After that, he not only smelled bad, he had some sickness that was both loathsome and catching. If he so much as tried to come near her, she hid behind Elayne and glared at him past the other woman’s shoulder for all the world as if she was about to stick her tongue out at him. Women were plain mad; that was all.
At least Thom and Juilin were willing to ride alongside him during the day, whenever Elayne did not demand their attention. She did sometimes, just to keep them away from him, he was sure, though he could not fathom the why. Once they found inns, the pair were more than happy to share a mug of ale or punch with him and Nalesean of an evening. They were country common rooms, brick-walled and quiet, where watching a brindle cat was the entertainment and the innkeeper herself served table, inevitably a woman with hips that looked as though a man’s fingers might break trying a pinch. The talk was of Ebou Dar mainly, of which Thom knew a good deal despite never having been there. Nalesean was more than willing to recount his one visit there as often as asked, though he wanted to focus on duels he had seen and the gambling on horse races. Juilin had stories from men who knew men who had been there, if not three or four removed, that sounded beyond belief until Thom or Nalesean confirmed them. Men fought duels over women in Ebou bar, and women over men, and in both cases the prize — that was the word used — agreed to go with the winner. Men gave women a knife when they married, asking her to use it to kill him if he displeased her — displeased her! — and a woman killing a man was considered justified unless it was proven differently. In Ebou Dar, men walked small around women, and forced a smile at what they would kill another man for. Elayne would love it. So would Nynaeve.
Something else came out in those talks. Mat had not imagined Nynaeve and Elayne’s displeasure at Vandene and Adeleas, however they tried to hide it. Nynaeve apparently contented herself with glaring and mumbling under her breath. Elayne did not frown or mutter, but she did continually try to take charge; she seemed to think she was already Queen of Andor. However many years those Aes Sedai faces hid, Vandene and Adeleas had to be old enough to be the younger women’s mothers if not grandmothers. Mat would not have been surprised to learn they were Aes Sedai when Nynaeve and Elayne were born. Even Thom could not fathom the tension, and he did seem to comprehend a great many things for a simple gleeman. Elayne had snapped Thom’s nose off and told him he did not understand, and could not, when he tried to remonstrate with her gently. It seemed the two older Aes Sedai were remarkably tolerant. Adeleas often did not appear to register the fact when Elayne gave orders, and both she and Vandene seemed surprised when they did notice.
“Vandene said, ‘Well, if you really want to, child, of course we will,’ ” Juilin muttered into his ale, recounting one incident. “You would think somebody who was only Accepted just a few days ago would be pleased. Elayne’s eyes minded me of a winter storm. Nynaeve ground her teeth so hard, I thought they’d crack.”
They were in the common room of The Marriage Knife. Vanin and Harnan and others occupied benches at other tables, together with a number of locals. The men were in long vests, some bright enough for a Tinker and often with no shirt, the women in pale dresses with deep narrow necklines, their skirts gathered up to the knee on one side to expose petticoats colorful enough to make the vests fade. Many of the men and all of the women wore large hoop earrings, and on their hands usually three or four rings sparkling with colored glass. Men and women alike fingered long curved knives stuck through their belts and eyed the strangers darkly. There were two merchant’s trains from Amadicia stopped at The Marriage Knife, but the merchants had eaten in their rooms, and their drivers remained with the wagons. Elayne and Nynaeve and the rest of the women were upstairs too.
“Women are . . . different,” Nalesean said, laughing, in response to Juilin, though he directed the words at Mat, fingering the point of his beard. He was not usually so stiff with commoners, but Juilin was a Tairen commoner, and that seemed to make a difference, especially since Juilin made a point of staring when he spoke to him. “There’s a peasant saying in Tear. ’An Aes Sedai is ten women in one skin.’ Peasants have a good bit of wisdom sometimes, burn my soul if they don’t.”
“At least no one has done anything, shall we say, drastic,” Thom said, “though I thought it was close when Elayne let slip that she had made Birgitte her first Warder.”
’The Hunter?” Mat exclaimed. Several of the locals looked at him hard, and he lowered his voice. “She’s a Warder as well? Elayne’s Warder?” That certainly explained a few things.
Thom and Juilin exchanged looks over the rims of their mugs.
“She will be gratified to know you puzzled out that she is a Hunter for the Horn,” Thom said, wiping ale from his mustaches. “Yes, she is, and a right set-to it nearly caused, too. Jaem took to her right away like a younger sister, but Vandene and Adeleas . . . ” He sighed heavily. “Neither was very pleased Elayne had already chosen a Warder — apparently most Aes Sedai go years before finding one — and they especially were not pleased she chose a woman. And their not being pleased has Elayne’s back up even more.”
“They don’t seem to like doing things that have not been done before,” Juilin added.
“A woman Warder,” Nalesean muttered. “I knew everything would change with the Dragon Reborn, but a woman Warder?”
Mat shrugged. “I suppose she’ll do well enough as long as she really can shoot that bow. Down the wrong hole?” he asked Juilin, who had begun choking on his ale. “Give me a good bow over a sword any day. Better a quarterstaff, but a bow is just fine. I only hope she doesn’t try to get in my way when it’s time to take Elayne to Rand.”
“I think she can shoot it.” Thom leaned across the table to slap Juilin on the back. “I think she can, Mat.”
But if Nynaeve and the others had any thought
s of hair-pulling — and Mat would not want to be within ten miles of that, foxhead or no — they showed none of it to him. All he saw was a solid front, and more attempts to channel at him, beginning while he was saddling Pips the morning after the first attempt. Luckily, he was busy fending off Nerim, who thought saddling Mat’s horse was his job and implied he could do it better, and the flash of cold lasted only a moment, so Mat gave no outward indication that he had noticed anything at all. That, he determined, would be his response. No stares, no glares, no accusations. He would ignore them and let them cook in their own broth.
He had plenty of opportunity to ignore them. The silver medallion went cold twice more before they found the road, then several times more during the day, that evening, and every day and evening thereafter. Sometimes it came and went in two blinks of an eye, and sometimes he was sure it went on for an hour. He could never tell which one was responsible, of course. Or usually not. Once, when the heat had given him a rash on his back and the scarf around his neck seemed about to saw his head off, he caught Nynaeve looking at him when the medallion grew cold. She was scowling so hard that a passing farmer, who was poking his ox with a stick, trying to make the animal lumber faster, peered over his shoulder at her as though he feared that gaze might turn on him any moment and maybe kill his ox in the cart shafts. Only when Mat scowled back at her, she gave a jump and almost fell out of her saddle, and the chill vanished. For the rest, he just could not say. At times he might see two or three of them watching him, including Aviendha, who was still walking and leading her horse. Others, by the time he peeked, were talking among themselves or looking at an eagle drifting across the cloudless sky or a great black bear, half again as tall as a man, standing among the trees on a steep hillside in sight of the road. The only truly good thing in it was that he got the impression Elayne was not pleased. He did not know why, and he did not care. Inspecting his men. Patting him on the head with compliments. If he had been the kind of man to do that sort of thing, he would have kicked her.