A Crown of Swords (15 page)

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Rand,” Perrin said, shifting the axe haft so he could drop to his heels. No one was close enough to hear except for Rand and Min and the two Maidens. If Sulin or Nandera went running to the Wise Ones, so be it. Without more preamble he launched into what he had seen so far this morning. What he had smelled, too, though he did not say that, Rand was not among the few who knew about him and wolves; he made it all seem what he had seen and heard. The Asha’man and the Wise Ones. The Asha’man and the Aes Sedai. The Wise Ones and the Aes Sedai. The whole tangle of tinder that might burst into flame any moment. He did not spare the Two Rivers men. “They’re worried, Rand, and if they are sweating, you can be sure some Cairhienin is thinking about doing something. Or a Tairen. Maybe just helping the prisoners escape, maybe something worse. Light, I could see Dannil and Tell and fifty more besides helping them get away, if they knew how.”

“You think something else would be that much worse?” Rand said quietly, and Perrin’s skin prickled.

He met Rand’s gaze directly. “A thousand times,” he said in just as quiet a voice. “I won’t be part of murder. If you will be, I’ll stand in your way.” A silence stretched, unblinking blue-gray eyes meeting unblinking golden.

Frowning at each of them in turn, Min made an exasperated sound in her throat. “You two woolheads! Rand, you know you’ll never give an order like that, or let anyone else give it, either. Perrin, you know he won’t. Now the pair of you stop acting like two strange roosters in a pen.”

Sulin chuckled, but Perrin wanted to ask Min how certain she was, although that was not a question he could voice here. Rand scrubbed his fingers through his hair, then shook his head, for all the world like a man disagreeing with somebody who was not there. The sort of voice that madmen heard.

“It’s never easy, is it?” Rand said after a time, looking sad. “The bitter truth is, I can’t say which would be worse. I don’t have any good choices. They saw to that themselves.” His face was despondent, but rage boiled in his scent. “Alive or dead, they’re a millstone on my back, and either way, they could break it.”

Perrin followed his gaze to the Aes Sedai prisoners. They were on their feet now, and all together, though even so they managed to put a little distance between the three who had been stilled and the rest. The Wise Ones around them were being curt with their orders, by the gestures they made and the tight faces on the sisters. Maybe the Wise Ones were better than Rand keeping them, too. If only he could be sure.

“Did you see anything, Min?” Rand said.

Perrin gave a start and directed a warning glance at Sulin and Nandera, but Min laughed softly. Leaning against Rand’s knee, she really did look the Min he knew, for the first time since finding her at the wells. “Perrin, they know about me. The Wise Ones, the Maidens, maybe all of them. And they don’t care.” She had a talent she kept hidden much as he did the wolves. Sometimes she saw images and auras around people, and sometimes she knew what they meant. “You can’t know what that’s like, Perrin. I was twelve when it started, and I didn’t know to make a secret of it. Everybody thought I was just making things up. Until I said a man on the next street was going to marry a woman I saw him with, only he was already married. When he ran off with her, his wife brought a mob to my aunts’ house claiming I was responsible, that I’d used the One Power on her husband or given the two of them some kind of potion.” Min shook her head. “She wasn’t too clear. She just had to blame somebody. There was talk of me being a Darkfriend, too. There had been some Whitecloaks in town earlier, trying to stir people up. Anyway, Aunt Rana convinced me to say I had just overheard them talking, and Aunt Miren promised to spank me for spreading tales, and Aunt Jan said she’d dose me. They didn’t, of course—they knew the truth—but if they hadn’t been so matter-of-fact about it, about me just being a child, I could have been hurt, or even killed. Most people don’t like somebody knowing things about their future; most people don’t really want to know it themselves, not unless it’s good anyway. Even my aunts didn’t. But to the Aiel, I am sort of a Wise One by courtesy.”

“Some can do things others cannot,” Nandera said, as if that was enough explanation.

Min laughed again and reached out to touch the Maiden’s knee.
“Thank you.” Settling her feet beneath her, she looked up at Rand. Now that she was laughing again, she seemed radiant. That held even after she became serious. Serious, and not very pleased. “As for your question, nothing of any use. Taim has blood in his past and blood in his future, but you could guess that. He’s a dangerous man. They seem to be gathering images like Aes Sedai.” A sidelong look through lowered eyelashes at Dashiva and the other Asha’man said who she meant. Most people had few images around them, but Min said Aes Sedai and Warders always did. “The problem is, what I can see is all blurry. I think it’s because they’re holding the Power. That often seems true with Aes Sedai, and it’s worse when they’re actually channeling. Kiruna and that lot have all sorts of things around them, but they stay so close together that it all . . . well . . . jumbles together most of the time. It’s even muddier with the prisoners.”

“Never mind the prisoners,” Rand told her. “That’s what they’ll stay.”

“But Rand, I keep feeling there is something important, if I could only pick it out. You need to know.”

“ ‘If you don’t know everything, you must go on with what you do know,’ ” Rand quoted wryly. “It seems I never do know everything. Hardly enough, most of the time. But there’s no choice but to go on, is there.” That was not at all a question.

Loial strode up, bubbling with energy despite his obvious weariness. “Rand, they say they’re ready to go, but you promised to talk to me while it’s fresh.” Abruptly his ears twitched with embarrassment, and that booming voice became plaintive. “I am sorry; I know it can’t be enjoyable. But I must know. For the book. For the Ages.”

Laughing, Rand got to his feet and tugged at the Ogier’s open coat. “For the Ages? Do writers all talk like that? Don’t worry, Loial. It will still be fresh when I tell you. I won’t forget.” A grim, sour scent flashed from him despite the smile, and was gone. “But back in Cairhien, after we all have a bath and sleep in a bed.” Rand motioned for Dashiva to come closer.

The man was not skinny, yet he moved in a hesitant, creeping way, hands folded at his waist, that made him seem so. “My Lord Dragon?” he said, tilting his head.

“Can you make a gateway, Dashiva?”

“Of course.” Dashiva began dry-washing his hands, flicking at his lips with the tip of his tongue, and Perrin wondered whether the man was always this jittery, or just when speaking to the Dragon Reborn. “That is to say, the M’hael teaches Traveling as soon as a student shows himself strong enough.”

“The M’Hael?” Rand said, blinking.

“The Lord Mazrim Taim’s title, my Lord Dragon. It means ‘leader.’ In the Old Tongue.” The fellow’s smile managed to be nervous and patronizing at the same time. “I read a great deal on the farm. Every book the peddlers brought by.”

“The M’Hael,” Rand muttered disapprovingly. “Well, be that as it may. Make me a gateway to near Cairhien, Dashiva. It’s time to see what the world has been up to while I was away, and what I have to do about it.” He laughed then, in a rueful way, but the sound of it made Perrin’s skin prickle.

On a wide low hilltop some miles north and east of the city of Cairhien, well away from any road or human habitation, a thin vertical slash of pure light appeared, taller than a man on a horse. The ground sloped away in every direction, undulating gently; nothing more than occasional brush obscured the view for more than a mile, all the way to the surrounding forest. Brown grass fell as the light seemed to rotate, widening into a square opening in midair. A number of the dead stems were slit lengthwise, sliced finer than any razor could have. By a hole in the air.

The instant the gateway was fully open, veiled Aiel poured out, men and Maidens, spreading in every direction to encircle the hill. Almost hidden in the torrent, four sharp-eyed Asha’man took up positions around the gateway itself, peering toward the encircling woodland. Nothing stirred except with the wind, dust, tall grass and branches in the distance, yet each Asha’man studied the vista with the fervor of a starving hawk searching for a rabbit. A rabbit watching for a hawk might have been as intent, but never with that air of menace.

There was really no break in the flow. One moment it was a flood of Aiel, the next, mounted Cairhienin armsmen galloping out two by two, the crimson Banner of Light going up at their head as soon as it cleared the gateway. Without a pause Dobraine drew his men aside and began forming
them up a little down the slope, helmeted and gauntleted in precise ranks, lances raised to the same angle. Seasoned campaigners, they were ready to wheel and charge in any direction at his gesture.

On the heels of the last Cairhienin, Perrin rode Stepper through, the dun passing in one stride from the hill below Dumai’s Wells to the hill in Cairhien, and ducked in spite of himself. The upper edge of the thing stood well above his head, but he had seen the damage a gateway could do and had no wish to test whether they were safer standing still. Loial and Aram followed close behind—the Ogier, afoot with his long-hafted axe on his shoulder, bent his knees—and then the Two Rivers men, crouching on their saddles well beyond the gateway. Rad al’Dai carried the Red Wolfhead banner, Perrin’s because everyone said it was, and Tell Lewin the Red Eagle.

Perrin tried not to look at those, especially the Red Eagle. The Two Rivers men wanted things both ways. He was a lord, so he had to have banners. He was a lord, but when he told them to get rid of those bloody banners, they never vanished for long. The Red Wolfhead named him something he was not and did not want to be, while the Red Eagle. . . . More than two thousand years after Manetheren died in the Trolloc Wars, close to a thousand after Andor swallowed part of what once had been Manetheren, that banner was still as good as an act of rebellion for an Andorman. Legends still walked in some men’s minds. Of course it had been a few generations since Two Rivers folk had had any notion that they were Andormen, but Queens’ minds did not change so easily.

He had met the new Queen of Andor what seemed a long time ago, in the Stone of Tear. She had not been Queen then—and was not yet, really, until she was crowned in Caemlyn—but Elayne seemed a pleasant young woman, and pretty, though he was not partial to fair-haired women. A bit taken with herself, of course, as Daughter-Heir. Taken with Rand, too, if snuggling in corners meant anything. Rand meant to give her not only the Lion Throne of Andor, but the Sun Throne of Cairhien. Surely she would be grateful enough to let the flying of a flag pass when it did not really mean anything. Watching the Two Rivers men deploy behind those banners, Perrin shook his head. It was a worry for another day, in any case.

There was nothing like armsmen’s precision in the Two Rivers men, most boys like Tod, farmers’ sons and shepherds, yet they knew what to do. Every fifth man took the reins of four more horses while the other riders hurriedly dismounted, longbows already strung and in hand. Those on the ground straggled together in rough lines, looking around with more interest than anything else, but they checked their quivers with practiced
gestures and handled their bows with familiarity, the great Two Rivers bows, even when strung nearly as tall as the men who drew them. With those bows, not a man of them but could shoot farther than anyone outside the Two Rivers would believe. And hit what he aimed at.