The Fires of Heaven (75 page)

“That was a smart thing you did,” she said, “hiding the hole I made. If a
gai’shain
had come in here, a thousand of the spear-sisters might have marched through seeking you.”

Asmodean cleared his throat. “One of the
gai’shain
did come. Someone named Sulin had told her she must see you eat, my Lord Dragon, and to stop her from bringing the tray in here and finding you gone, I took the liberty of telling her that you and the young woman did not want to be disturbed.” A slight tightening of his eyes caught Rand’s attention.

“What?”

“Just that she took it strangely. She laughed out loud and went running off. A few minutes later, there must have been twenty
Far Dareis Mai
beneath the window, shouting and beating their spears on their bucklers for a good hour or more. I must say, my Lord Dragon, some of the suggestions they called up startled even me.”

Rand felt his cheeks burning—it had happened on the other side of the bloody world, and still the Maidens knew!—but Aviendha only narrowed her eyes.

“Did she have hair and eyes like mine?” She did not wait for Asmodean’s nod. “It must have been my first-sister Niella.” She saw the startled question on Rand’s face and answered it before he could speak. “Niella is a weaver, not a Maiden, and she was taken half a year ago by Chareen Maidens during a raid on Sulara Hold. She tried to talk me out of taking the spear, and she has always wanted me wed. I am going to send her back to the Chareen with a welt on her bottom for every one she told!”

Rand caught her arm as she started to stalk out of the room. “I want to talk with Natael. I don’t suppose there is much time left until dawn . . .”

“Two hours, maybe,” Asmodean put in.

“. . . so there will be little sleeping now. If you want to try, would you
mind making your bed elsewhere for what’s left of the night? You need new blankets anyway.”

She nodded curtly before pulling loose, and slammed the door behind her. Surely she was not angry at being tossed out of his bedchamber—how could she be; she had said nothing more would happen between them—but he was glad he was not Niella.

Bouncing the shortened spear in his hand, he turned to Asmodean.

“A strange scepter, my Lord Dragon.”

“It will do for one.” To remind him that the Seanchan were still out there. For once he wished his voice was even colder than the Void and
saidin
made it. He had to be hard. “Before I decide whether to skewer you with it like a lamb, why did you never mention this trick of making something invisible? If I hadn’t been able to see the flows, I’d never have known the gateway was still there.”

Asmodean swallowed, shifting as though he did not know whether Rand meant his threat. Rand was not sure himself. “My Lord Dragon, you never asked. A matter of bending light. You always have so many questions, it is hard to find a moment to speak of anything else. You must realize by now that I’ve thrown my lot in with yours completely.” Licking his lips, he got up. As far as his knees. And began to babble. “I felt your weave—anybody within a mile could have felt it—I never saw anything like it—I didn’t know that anyone but Demandred could block a gateway that was closing, and maybe Semirhage—and Lews Therin—I felt it, and came, and a hard time I had getting past those Maidens—I used the same trick—you
must
know I am your man now. My Lord Dragon, I am your man.”

It was the repetition of what the Cairhienin had said that got through as much as anything else. Gesturing with the half-spear, he said roughly, “Stand. You aren’t a dog.” But as Asmodean slowly rose, he laid the long spearpoint alongside the man’s throat. He had to be hard. “From now on, you will tell me two things I
don’t
ask about every time we talk. Every time, mind. If I think you are trying to hide anything from me, you will be glad to let Semirhage have you.”

“As you say, my Lord Dragon,” Asmodean stammered. He looked ready to bow and kiss Rand’s hand.

To avoid the chance, Rand moved to the blanketless bed and sat on the linen sheet, the feather mattresses yielding under him as he studied the spear. A good idea to keep it for remembrance, if not as a scepter. Even with everything else, he had best not forget the Seanchan. Those
damane.
If Aviendha had not been there to block them from the Source . . .

“You have tried showing me how to shield a woman and failed. Try showing me how to avoid flows I cannot see, how to counter them.” Once Lanfear had sliced his weavings as neatly as with a knife.

“Not easy, my Lord Dragon, without a woman to practice against.”

“We have two hours,” Rand said coldly, letting the man’s shield unravel. “Try. Try very hard.”

T
he knife brushed Nynaeve’s hair as it thunked into the board she was leaning against, and she flinched behind her blindfold. She wished she had a decent braid instead of locks hanging loose about her shoulders. If that blade had cut even one strand . . .
Fool woman,
she thought bitterly.
Fool, fool woman.
With the scarf folded over her eyes she could just see a narrow line of light at the bottom. It seemed bright, from the darkness behind the thick folds. There had to be enough light yet, even if it was late afternoon. Surely the man would not throw when he could not see properly. The next blade struck on the other side of her head; she could feel it vibrating. She thought it almost touched her ear. She was going to kill Thom Merrilin and Valan Luca. And maybe any other man she could get her hands on, on sheer principle.

“The pears,” Luca shouted, as if he were not just thirty paces from her. He must think the blindfold made her deaf as well as blind.

Fumbling in the pouch at her belt, she brought out a pear and carefully balanced it atop her head. She
was
blind. A pure blind fool! Two more pears, and she gingerly extended her arms to either side between the knives that outlined her, holding one in either hand by the stems. There was a pause. She opened her mouth to tell Thom Merrilin that if he so much as nicked her, she would—

Tchunk-tchunk-tchunk!
The blades came so fast she would have yelped if
her throat had not contracted like a fist. She held only the stem in her left hand, the other pear trembled faintly with the knife through it, and the pear on her head leaked juice into her hair.

Snatching the scarf off, she stalked toward Thom and Luca, both of them grinning like maniacs. Before she could speak one of the words boiling up in her, Luca said admiringly, “You are magnificent, Nana. Your bravery is magnificent, but you are more so.” He swirled that ridiculous red silk cloak in a bow, one hand over his heart. “I shall call this ‘Rose Among Thorns.’ Though truly, you are more beautiful than any mere rose.”

“It doesn’t take much bravery to stand like a stump.” A rose, was she? She would show him thorns. She would show both of them. “You listen to me, Valan Luca—”

“Such courage. You never even flinch. I tell you, I would not have the stomach to do what you are doing.”

That was the simple truth, she told herself. “I am no braver than I have to be,” she said in a milder tone. It was hard to shout at a man who insisted on telling you how brave you were. Certainly better to hear than all that blather about roses. Thom knuckled his long white mustaches as if he saw something funny.

“The dress,” Luca said, showing all of his teeth in a smile. “You will look wonderful in—”

“No!” she snapped. Whatever he had gained, he had just lost by bringing this up again. Clarine had made the dress Luca wanted her to wear, in silk more crimson than his cloak. It was her opinion that the color was to hide blood; if Thom’s hand slipped.

“But, Nana, beauty in danger is a
great
draw.” Luca’s voice crooned as if whispering sweetness in her ear. “You will have every eye on you, every heart pounding for your beauty and courage.”

“If you like it so much,” she said firmly, “you wear it.” Aside from the color, she was not about to show that much bosom in public, whether or not Clarine thought it was proper. She had seen Latelle’s performing dress, all black spangles, with a high neck to her chin. She could wear something like . . . What was she thinking? She had no intention of actually going through with this. She had only agreed to this practice to stop Luca scratching at the wagon door every night to try convincing her.

The man was nothing if not deft at knowing when to change the subject. “What happened here?” he asked, suddenly all smooth solicitude.

She flinched as he touched her puffy eye. It was his bad luck to choose that. He would have done better to continue trying to stuff her into that
red dress. “I did not like the way it looked at me in the mirror this morning, so I bit it.”

Her flat tone and bared teeth made Luca snatch his hand back. From the wary gleam in his dark eyes, he suspected she might bite again. Thom was stroking his mustaches furiously, red in the face from the effort of not laughing. He knew what had happened, of course. He would. And as soon as she left, he would no doubt regale Luca with his version of events. Men could not avoid gossiping; it was in them at birth, and nothing women could do ever got it out of them.

The daylight was dimmer than she had thought. The sun sat red on the treetops to the west. “If you ever try this again without better light . . .” she growled, shaking a fist at Thom. “It’s almost dusk!”

“I suppose,” the man said, bushy eyebrow lifting, “this means you want to leave out the bit where
I
am blindfolded?” He was joking, of course. He had to be joking. “As you wish, Nana. From now on, only in the most perfect light.”

It was not until she stalked away, swishing her skirts angrily, that she realized that she had agreed to actually do this fool thing. By implication, at least. They would try to hold her to it, as surely as the sun would set tonight.
Fool, fool,
fool
woman!

The clearing where they—or Thom, at least, burn him and Luca both!—had been practicing stood some little distance from the camp over beside the road north. Doubtless Luca had not wanted to upset the animals should Thom put one of his knives through her heart. The man would likely have fed her corpse to the lions. The only reason he wanted her to wear that dress was so he could ogle what she had no intention of showing to anyone but Lan, and burn him, too, for a stubborn fool man. She wished she had him there so she could tell him so. She wished she had him there so she could be sure he was safe. She broke a dead dogfennel and used its feathery brown length like a whip to snap the heads off weeds that poked through the leaves on the ground.

Last night, Elayne had said, Egwene reported fighting in Cairhien, skirmishes with brigands, with Cairhienin who saw any Aiel as an enemy, with Andoran soldiers trying to claim the Sun Throne for Morgase. Lan had been involved in them; whenever Moiraine let him out of her sight, he apparently managed to take himself to the fighting, as if he could sense where it would be. Nynaeve had never thought that she would want the Aes Sedai to keep Lan on a short leash at her side.

This morning Elayne had still been disturbed about her mother’s soldiers
being in Cairhien, fighting Rand’s Aiel, but what worried Nynaeve was the brigands. According to Egwene, if anyone could identify stolen property in a brigand’s possession, if anyone could swear to seeing him kill anyone or burn so much as a shed, Rand was hanging him. He did not put his hands on the rope, but it was the same thing, and Egwene said he watched every execution with a face cold and hard as the mountains. That was not like him. He had been a gentle boy. Whatever had happened to him in the Waste had been very much for the worse.

Well, Rand was far away, and her own problems—hers and Elayne’s—were no nearer solution. The River Eldar lay less than a mile north, spanned by a single lofty stone bridge built between tall metal pillars that glistened without a speck of rust. Remnants of an earlier time, certainly, perhaps even an earlier Age. She had gone up to it at midday, right after they arrived, but there had not been a boat in the river worthy of the name. Rowboats, small fishing boats working along the reed-lined banks, some strange, narrow little things that skittered over the water propelled by kneeling men with paddles, even a squat barge that looked to be moored in mud—there seemed to be a lot of mud showing on both sides, some of it dried hard and cracked, yet that was no wonder with the heat holding on so unseasonably—but nothing that could carry them swiftly away downriver as she wanted. Not that she knew where it was to take them, yet.