Lord of Chaos (132 page)

They reached the distant forest that first day with the sun still fairly well up in the sky, and rode several hours beneath a high canopy of mostly bare branches, with dead leaves and dry branches crunching under the horses’ hooves, until making camp near a dwindling stream just before sunset. Lantern-jawed Harnan, the file leader with the hawk tattooed on his cheek, saw to getting the troopers from the Band settled, the horses curried and hobbled, sentries set and fires lit. Nerim and Lopin bustled about moaning over not having brought tents, and how was a man to know they would be spending nights on the ground when his master said nothing, and if his master caught his death of something, it was not his fault. Skinny and stout, they managed to sound like echoes. Vanin took care of himself, of course, though he did keep an eye on Olver and even curried the parts of Wind that the boy could not reach even using his saddle for a stool. Everybody took care of Olver.

The women shared the camp, but in a way their area was as separate as if it had been fifty paces away. An invisible line seemed to split the campsite in half, with invisible signs telling the troopers not to cross. Nynaeve
and Elayne and the two white-haired women gathered around their own fire with Aviendha and the golden-haired Hunter, rarely even glancing toward where Mat and his men were laying out their blankets. The murmured conversation Mat heard, as much as he could make out, had to do with Vandene and Adeleas’ concern that Aviendha meant to lead her horse all the way to Ebou Dar instead of riding. Thom tried to get a word in with Elayne and received an absent pat on the cheek, of all things, before he was sent back to sit with Juilin and Jaem, the stringy old Warder, who belonged to Vandene and seemed to spend all of his time sharpening his sword.

Mat had no objection to the women staying apart. A tension he could not understand hung around them. At least, it did around Nynaeve and Elayne, and the Hunter seemed to be infected too. They sometimes stared at the Aes Sedai—the other Aes Sedai; he was not sure he would ever become used to thinking of Nynaeve and Elayne that way—a bit too intently, though Vandene and Adeleas appeared as oblivious as Aviendha. Whatever the reason, Mat wanted no part of it. It smelled like an argument burning to leap out, and whether it burst into flame or smoldered underground, a wise man stepped wide of women’s arguments. Medallion or no medallion, a wise man stepped very wide if the women were Aes Sedai.

A small irritant that, and so was the next, which was his own fault. Food. The smell of lamb and some sort of soup quickly wafted from the Aes Sedai’s fire. Expecting a quick arrival in Ebou Dar, he had said nothing about food to Vanin and the others, which meant they had a little dried meat and hard cakes of flatbread in their saddlebags. Mat had seen hardly a bird or squirrel, let alone sign of a deer, so hunting was out of the question. When Nerim set up a small folding table and stool for Mat—Lopin was putting up another for Nalesean—Mat told him to share out what he had tucked away in the packhorses’ panniers. The result was not as good as he hoped.

Nerim stood by Mat’s table, pouring water from a silver pitcher as if it were wine and mournfully watching delicacies vanish down the trooper’s gullets. “Pickled quail eggs, my Lord,” he would announce in a funereal tone. “They would have gone very well for my Lord’s breakfast in Ebou Dar.” And, “The best smoked tongue, my Lord. If my Lord only knew what I went through to find honey-smoked tongue in that wretched village, with no time to find anything and all the best taken by the Aes
Sedai.” Actually, his biggest grievance seemed to be that Lopin had found potted larks for Nalesean. Every time Nalesean crunched one between his teeth, Lopin’s smug smile grew wider and Nerim’s face grew longer. For that matter, it was plain from the way some of the men sniffed the air that they would rather have had a slice of lamb and a bowl of soup than any amount of honey-smoked tongue or goose-liver pudding. Olver stared at the women’s fire with open wistfulness.

“You want to eat with them?” Mat asked him. “It’s all right, if you do.”

“I like kippered eel,” Olver said stoutly. In a darker tone, he added, “Anyway, she might put something in it.” His eyes followed Aviendha every time she shifted, and he seemed to have taken against the Hunter too, perhaps because she spent a good bit of time in obviously friendly chat with the Aiel woman. Aviendha at least must have felt the boy’s stare, because she glanced at him and frowned.

Wiping his chin and eyeing the Aes Sedai’s fire—come to think of it, he would rather have had lamb and soup himself—Mat noticed that Jaem was missing. Vanin grumped about being sent out again, but Mat sent him for the same reason he had had the man scout ahead during the day despite the fact that Jaem did too. He did not want to rely on what the Aes Sedai chose to tell him. He might have trusted Nynaeve—he did not think she would actually lie to him; as Wisdom, Nynaeve had always been death on anyone lying—but she kept peeping at him past Adeleas’ shoulder in a very suspicious way.

To his surprise, Elayne rose as soon as she finished eating and came gliding across that invisible line. Some women just seemed to skim over the ground. “Will you walk aside with me, Master Cauthon?” she asked coolly. Not polite, exactly, but not exactly rude either.

He motioned her to lead the way, and she floated out into the moon-shadowed trees beyond the sentries. That golden hair nestled about her shoulders, framing a face to make any man stare, and the moonlight softened her arrogance. If she had been anything but what she was. . . . And he did not mean just Aes Sedai, nor even that she belonged to Rand. Rand did seem to be tangling himself with the worst sort of woman for a man who had always known how to handle them. Then Elayne began talking, and he forgot everything else.

“You have a
ter’angreal
,” she said without preamble, and without looking at him. She just glided along, rustling the leaves on the ground, as if she expected him to heel like a hunting hound. “Some hold that
ter’angreal
are rightfully the property of Aes Sedai, but I do not require you to surrender it. No one will take it from you. Such things need study, however. For that reason, I want you to give the
ter’angreal
to me each evening when we stop. I will return it each morning before we start out.”

Mat gave her a sidelong look. She was serious, no doubt about it. “That’s very kind of you, letting me keep what’s mine. Only, what makes you think I have one of these . . . what did you call it? A ter-something?”

Oh, she did stiffen up at that, and looked at him too. He was surprised not to see fire leap from her eyes to light up the night. Her voice, on the other hand, was purest crystal ice. “You know very
well
what a
ter’angreal
is, Master Cauthon. I heard Moiraine speak of them to you in the Stone of Tear.”

“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, jagged 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 Dar, 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.