The Fires of Heaven (115 page)

All but two of the men were grizzled or balding, with leathery faces and work-callused hands. Younger men had been snatched into the army if they were not caught up by the Prophet; those who refused one or the other had been hanged. The young pair—little more than boys, really; Nynaeve doubted if either had to shave regularly—wore hunted stares, and flinched if one of the Shienarans looked at them. Sometimes the older men talked of starting over, finding a bit of land to farm or taking up their trade again, but the tone of their voices said it was more bluff and bravado than real hope. Mostly they talked quietly of their families; a wife lost, sons and daughters lost, grandchildren lost. They sounded lost. The second night, a jug-eared fellow who had seemed the most enthusiastic in a sad lot had just vanished; he was simply gone when the sun came up. He might have swum ashore. Nynaeve hoped he had.

Still, it was the women who caught her heart. They had no more prospects than the men, no more certainties, but most had more burdens. None had a husband with her, or even knew if she had a husband alive, yet the responsibilities that weighed them down also kept them moving. No woman with grit could give up when she had children. Even the others meant to find some future, though. They all had at least a scrap of the hope the men only pretended to. Three especially tugged at her.

Nicola was about her age and height, a slender dark-haired weaver with big eyes who had been intending to marry. Until her Hyran took it into his head that duty called him to follow the Prophet, to follow the Dragon Reborn; he would marry her when his duty was seen to. Duty had been very important to Hyran. He would have made a good and conscientious husband and father, so Nicola said. Only, whatever was in his head had not done him much good when someone split it with an axe. Nicola did not know who, or why, just that she had to get as far from the Prophet as she could. Somewhere, there had to be a place where there was no killing, where she would not always be in fear of what might be around the next corner.

Marigan, a few years older, had been plump once, but her frayed brown dress hung on her loosely now, and her blunt face looked beyond weary. Her two sons, six and seven, stared silently at the world with too-big eyes; clinging to each other, they seemed frightened of everything and everyone else, even their own mother. Marigan had dealt in cures and herbs in Samara, though she had some odd ideas about both. That was no wonder, really; a woman who offered healing with Amadicia and Whitecloaks right across the river had to keep low, and even from the first she had had to teach herself. All she had ever wanted to do was cure sickness, and she claimed to have done it well, though she had not been able to save her husband. The five years since his death had been hard, and the coming of the Prophet had certainly not helped her any. Mobs searching for Aes Sedai chased her into hiding after she had cured a man of fever and rumor had turned it into bringing him back from the dead. That was how little most people knew of Aes Sedai; death was beyond the power to Heal. Even Marigan seemed to think it was not. She did not know where she was going any more than Nicola. A village somewhere, she hoped, where she could dispense herbs again in peace.

Areina was the youngest of the three, with steady blue eyes in a face bruised purple and yellow, and not from Ghealdan at all. Her clothes would have said that if nothing else did, a short dark coat and voluminous trousers not much different from Birgitte’s. They were the sum of her possessions. She would not say where she was from exactly, but she was forthcoming about the road that had led her to
Riverserpent.
About some of it; Nynaeve had to infer in places. Areina had gone to Illian meaning to bring her younger brother home before he could take the oath as a Hunter for the Horn. With thousands in the city, however, she had never found him, but somehow she had found herself taking the oath, setting out to see the world while not quite believing the Horn of Valere existed, half hoping that somewhere she would find young Gwil and take him home. Things had been . . . difficult . . . since. Areina was not precisely reluctant to talk, but she made such an effort to put a good face on things. . . . She had been chased out of several villages, robbed once, and beaten several times. Even so, she had no intention of giving up or seeking sanctuary, or a peaceful village. The world was still out there, and Areina meant to wrestle it to the ground. Not that she put it that way, but Nynaeve knew it was what the woman meant.

Nynaeve knew very well why they touched her most, too. Each story could have been the reflection of a thread in her own life. What she did not
quite understand was why she liked Areina best. It was her opinion, putting this and that together, that nearly all of Areina’s troubles came from having too free a tongue, telling people exactly what she thought. It could hardly be coincidence that she was harried out of one village so quickly she had to leave her horse behind after calling the mayor a pie-faced loon and telling some village women that dry-bones kitchen sweepers had no right to question why she was on the road alone. That was what she admitted to saying. Nynaeve thought a few days of herself for example would do Areina worlds of good. And there had to be something she could do for the other two, as well. She could understand a desire for safety and peace very well.

There was an odd exchange the morning of the second day, while tempers were still tender and tongues—
some
people’s tongues!—still rough. Nynaeve said something, quite mildly, about Elayne not being in her mother’s palace, so she need not think Nynaeve was going to sleep shoved against the wall every night. Elayne tilted up her chin, but before she could open her mouth, Birgitte blurted, “You are the Daughter-Heir of Andor?” She hardly looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear.

“I am.” Elayne sounded more dignified than Nynaeve remembered in some time, but there was a hint of—could it be satisfaction?

Face completely blank, Birgitte simply turned away, walking up into the bow where she sat on a coil of rope, staring at the river ahead. Elayne frowned after her, then finally went to sit beside her. They sat talking softly for some time. Nynaeve would not have joined them even had she been
asked
! Whatever they discussed, Elayne seemed slightly disgruntled, as if she had expected some other result, but after that there was hardly a cross word between them.

Birgitte resumed her own name later that same day, though it was a last flare of temper that did it. With Moghedien safely behind them, she and Elayne washed the black out of their hair with pokeleaf, and Neres seeing one with red-gold curls about her shoulders and the other yellow-gold in an intricate braid, and that one with bow and quiver, muttered acridly about “Birgitte stepping out of the bloody stories.” It was his misfortune that she overheard. That
was
her name, she told him sharply, and if he did not like it, she would pin his ears to either mast he chose. Blindfolded. He stalked off red-faced and shouting for lines to be tightened that could not have been made any tighter without popping.

At that point Nynaeve would not have cared whether Birgitte actually carried out the threat. Pokeleaf might have left a slight reddish cast to her own hair, yet it was close enough to its natural color almost to make her
cry for joy. Unless everyone aboard came down with sore gums and toothaches, she had more than enough pokeleaf remaining. And sufficient red fennel to keep her stomach in its place. She could not help sighing in satisfaction once her hair was dry and in a proper braid again.

Of course, with Elayne channeling good winds and Neres running light or dark, thatch-roofed villages and farms sped past on either bank, marked by people waving in the day and lit windows in the night, showing no sign of the turmoil farther upriver. Broad as the misnamed craft was, it made good time, rolling along downriver.

Neres seemed torn between pleasure at his good luck at such winds and worry at moving in daylight. More than once he gazed longingly at a backwater, a tree-shrouded stream or a pool cut deep into the bank where
Riverserpent
might have been moored and hidden. Occasionally Nynaeve remarked where he could hear about how glad he must be that the people from Samara would soon be off his ship, with a comment thrown in about how well this woman was looking now that she was rested or how energetic that woman’s children were. That was enough to put ideas of stopping right out of his head. It might have been easier to threaten him with the Shienarans, or Thom and Juilin, but those fellows were getting entirely too bigheaded as it was. And she certainly had no intention of arguing with a man who still would neither look at her nor talk to her.

Gray dawning of the third day saw the crew manning the sweeps again to draw them in to a dock at Boannda. It was a considerable town, larger than Samara, on a point of land where the swift River Boern, coming down from Jehannah, ran into the slower Eldar. There were even three towers inside the tall gray walls, and a building shining white beneath a red tile roof that could certainly pass for a palace, if a small one. As
Riverserpent
was lashed fast to the heavy pilings at the end of one dock—half their length across dried mud—Nynaeve wondered aloud why Neres had gone all the way to Samara when he could have unloaded his goods here.

Elayne nodded toward a stout man on the dock who wore a chain with some sort of seal hanging across his chest. There were several others like him, all with the chain and a blue coat, intently watching two other broad vessels unload at other docks. “Queen Alliandre’s excisemen, I should say.” Drumming his fingers on the rail, Neres was
not
looking at the men just as intently as they were at the other vessels. “Perhaps he had an arrangement with those in Samara. I don’t think he wants to talk to these.”

The men and women from Samara marched reluctantly up the gangplank, ignored by the excisemen. There was no custom duty on people.
For the Samarans, it was the beginning of uncertainty. They had their lives ahead of them, and to begin anew, what they stood up in and what Nynaeve and Elayne had given them. Before they were halfway down the dock, still huddling together, some of the women were beginning to look as disheartened as the men. Some even began to cry. Vexation painted Elayne’s face. She always wanted to take care of everyone. Nynaeve hoped Elayne did not discover that she had slipped a few more silvers to some of the women.

Not all left the ship. Areina remained, and Nicola, and Marigan, tightly clutching her sons, who gazed in anxious silence after the other children vanishing toward the town. The two lads had not said a word since Samara that Nynaeve had heard.

“I want to go with you,” Nicola told Nynaeve, unconsciously wringing her hands. “I feel safe near you.” Marigan nodded emphatically. Areina said nothing, but she stepped closer to the other two women, making herself part of the group even as she looked levelly at Nynaeve, defying her to send her away.

Thom shook his head slightly, and Juilin grimaced, but it was to Elayne and Birgitte that Nynaeve looked. Elayne did not hesitate in nodding, and the other woman was only a second behind. Gathering her skirts, Nynaeve marched to Neres, standing in the stern.

“I suppose I will have my ship back now,” he told the air somewhere between the ship and the dock. “Not beforetime. This voyage has been the worst I ever undertook.”

Nynaeve smiled broadly. For once, he did look at her before she was done. Well, he almost did.

It was not as if Neres had much choice. He could hardly appeal to the authorities in Boannda. And if he did not like the fares she offered, well, he had to sail downriver anyway. So
Riverserpent
cast off again, heading for Ebou Dar, with one stop to be made that he was not informed of until Boannda began falling astern.

“Salidar!” he growled, staring over Nynaeve’s head. “Salidar’s been abandoned since the Whitecloak War. It would take a fool woman to want to be ashore at Salidar.”

Even smiling, Nynaeve was angry enough to embrace the Source. Neres roared, slapping at his neck and his hip at the same time. “The horseflies are very bad this time of year,” she said sympathetically. Birgitte roared with laughter before they were halfway down the deck.

Standing in the bows, Nynaeve inhaled deeply as Elayne channeled to
bring the wind up again and
Riverserpent
lumbered into the strong current flowing out of the Boern. She was all but eating red fennel for meals, but even if she ran out before Salidar, she would not care. Their journey was almost over. Everything she had been through was worth it, for that. Of course, she had not always thought so, and Elayne and Birgitte’s rasping tongues had not been the only cause.

That first night, lying on the captain’s bed in her shift while a yawning Elayne occupied the chair and Birgitte leaned against the door with her head brushing the beams, Nynaeve had used the twisted stone ring. A single rusty gimbal-mounted lamp gave light, and surprisingly, a scent of spice from the oil; maybe Neres had not liked the stench of must and mold, either. If she was ostentatious about nestling the ring between her breasts—and making sure the others knew it touched skin—well, she had cause. A few hours of superficially reasonable behavior on their parts had not made her less wary.

The Heart of the Stone was exactly as it had been every time before, pale light coming from everywhere and nowhere, the glittering crystal sword
Callandor
thrust into the floorstones beneath the great dome, rows of huge polished redstone columns running off into shadow. And that sensation of being watched that was so common in
Tel’aran’rhiod.
It was all Nynaeve could do not to flee, or set off on a frantic search through the columns. She forced herself to stand in one place beside
Callandor,
counting slowly to one thousand and pausing every hundred to call Egwene’s name.

Truly, it was all she could do. The control she was so proud of vanished. Her clothes flickered with her worries about herself and Moghedien, Egwene and Rand and Lan. Between one minute and the next stout Two Rivers woolens became a muffling cloak and deep hood which became a suit of Whitecloak mail which became the red silk dress—only transparent!— which became an ever thicker cloak which became . . . She thought her face changed, too. Once she saw her hands, with skin darker than Juilin’s. Perhaps if Moghedien could not recognize her . . .