“Fool man,” Bair muttered. “All of the signs.” Tossing the waterbag to Mat, she seized Rand’s right arm and stripped back his sleeve, exposing a mirror twin of the creature on his left forearm. Her breath caught, then came out in a long sigh. She seemed balanced on a razor edge between relief and apprehension. There was no mistaking it; she had hoped for the second marking, yet it made her afraid. Amys and the other two Wise Women echoed her sign almost exactly. It was odd to see Aiel fearful.
Rand almost laughed. Not that he was amused. “Twice and twice shall he be marked.” That was what the Prophecies of the Dragon said. A heron branded into each palm, and now these. One of the peculiar creatures—Dragons, the Prophecy called them—was supposed to be “for remembrance lost.” Rhuidean had certainly supplied that, the lost history of the Aiel’s origins. And the other was for “the price he must pay.” How soon must I pay it? he wondered. And how many have to pay with me? Others always had to, even when he tried to pay alone.
Apprehensive or not, Bair did not pause before shoving that arm above his head, too, and proclaiming loudly, “Behold what has never been seen before. A Car’a’carn has been chosen, a chief of chiefs. Born of a Maiden, he has come with the dawn from Rhuidean, according to prophecy, to unite the Aiel! The fulfillment of prophecy has begun!”
The reactions of the other Aiel were nothing like what Rand envisioned. Couladin stared down at him, even more hatefully than before if that was possible, then leaped from the outcrop and stalked up the slope to vanish into the Shaido tents. The Shaido themselves began to disperse, glancing at Rand with unreadable faces before drifting back to their tents. Heirn and the warriors of the Jindo sept, hardly hesitating, did the same. In moments only Rhuarc remained, his eyes troubled. Lan went over to the clan chief; from his face, the Warder would just as soon not have seen Rand at all. Rand was not sure what he had expected, but surely something other than this.
“Burn me!” Mat muttered. He seemed to realize for the first time that he had the waterbag in his hands. Jerking the plug free, he held the hide bag high, letting nearly as much splash over his face as into his mouth. When he finally lowered it, he looked at the markings on Rand’s arms again and shook his head, repeating, “Burn me!” as he pushed the sloshing bag at him.
Rand stared at the Aiel in consternation, but he was more than glad to drink. The first gulps hurt his throat, it was so dry.
“What happened to you?” Egwene demanded. “Did Muradin attack you?”
“It is forbidden to speak of what occurs in Rhuidean,” Bair said sharply.
“Not Muradin,” Rand said. “Where’s Moiraine? I expected her to be the first to meet us.” He rubbed his face; black flakes of dried blood came off on his hand. “For once, I won’t care if she asks before she Heals me.”
“Me either,” Mat said hoarsely. He swayed, holding himself up with his spear, and pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead. “My brain is spinning.”
Egwene grimaced. “She is still in Rhuidean, I suppose. But if you have finally come out, maybe she will, as well. She left right after you. And Aviendha. You’ve all been gone so long.”
“Moiraine went to Rhuidean?” Rand said incredulously. “And Aviendha? Why did—?” Abruptly he registered what else she had said. “What do you mean, ‘so long’?”
“This is the seventh day,” she said. “The seventh day since you all went down into the valley.”
The waterbag fell from his hands. Seana snatched it up again before more than a little of its contents, so precious in the Waste, could trickle away down the stony slope. Rand barely noticed. Seven days. Anything could have happened in seven days. They could be catching up to me, figuring out what I’m planning. I have to move. Fast. I have to keep ahead of them. I haven’t come this far to fail.
They were all staring at him, even Rhuarc and Mat, concern writ large on their faces. And caution. No wonder in that. Who could say what he might do, or how sane he still was? Only Lan did not change his stony scowl.
“I told you that was Aviendha, Rand. Bare as she was born.” Mat’s voice had a painful rasp to it, and his legs looked none too steady.
“How long before Moiraine comes back?” Rand asked. If she had gone in at the same time, she should return soon.
“If she has not returned by the tenth day,” Bair replied, “she will not. No one has ever returned after ten days.”
Another three days, maybe. Three more days when he had already lost seven. Let them come, now. I will not fail! He barely kept a snarl from his face. “You can channel. One of you can, anyway. I saw how you flung Couladin about. Will you Heal Mat?”
Amys and Melaine exchanged looks he could only call rueful.
“Our paths have gone other ways,” Amys said regretfully. “There are Wise Ones who could do what you ask, after a fashion, but we are not among them.”
“What do you mean?” he snapped angrily. “You can channel like Aes Sedai. Why can’t you Heal like them? You did not want him to go to Rhuidean in the first place. Do you think you can let him die from it?”
“I’ll survive,” Mat said, but his eyes were tight with suffering.
Egwene put a hand on Rand’s arm. “Not all Aes Sedai can Heal very well,” she said in a soothing voice. “The best Healers are all Yellow Ajah. Sheriam, the Mistress of Novices, cannot Heal anything much more serious than a bruise or a small cut. No two women can have exactly the same Talents or skills.”
Her tone irritated him. He was not some pettish child to be smoothed down. He frowned at the Wise Ones. Could not or would not, Mat and he would have to wait for Moiraine. If she had not been killed by that bubble of evil, by those dust creatures. It must have dissipated by now; there had been an end to the one in Tear. They wouldn’t have stopped her. She could channel her way through them. She knows what she’s doing; she doesn’t have to figure it out an inch at a time the way I do. But then why was she not back? Why had she gone in the first place, and why had he not seen her? Foolish question. A hundred people could have been in Rhuidean without being seen. Too many questions, and no answers until she did return, he suspected. If then.
“There are herbs and ointments,” Seana said. “Come out of the sun, and we will tend your injuries.”
“Out of the sun,” Rand muttered. “Yes.” He was being boorish, but he did not care. Why had Moiraine gone into Rhuidean? He did not trust her to stop pushing him in the direction she thought best, and the Dark One take his opinions. If she was in there, could she have affected what he saw? Changed it some way? If she even suspected what he planned �� .
He started toward the Jindo tents—Couladin’s people were not likely to offer him a resting place—but Amys turned him toward the flat farther up where the Wise Ones’ tents stood. “They might not be comfortable with you among them just yet,” she said, Rhuarc, falling in beside her, nodded agreement.
Melaine glanced at Lan. “This is no business of yours, Aan’allein. You and Rhuarc take Matrim and—”
“No,” Rand broke in. “I want them with me.” Partly it was because he wanted answers from the clan chief, and partly it was sheer stubbornness. These Wise Ones were all set to guide him around on a leash, just like Moiraine. He was not about to put up with it. They looked at one another, then nodded as if acceding to a request. If they thought he would be a good boy because they gave him a sweet, they were mistaken. “I’d have thought you would be with Moiraine,” he said to Lan, ignoring the Wise Ones and their nods.
A flash of embarrassment crossed the Warder’s face. “The Wise Ones managed to hide her going until nearly sunset,” he said stiffly. “Then they … convinced me following would serve no purpose. They said even if I did, I could not find her until she was already on her way out, and she would not need me, then. I am no longer certain I should have listened.”
“Listened!” Melaine snorted. Her gold and ivory bracelets clattered as she adjusted her shawl irritably. “Trust a man to make himself sound reasonable. Y
ou would almost certainly have died, and very likely killed her, too.”
“Melaine and I had to hold him down half the night before he would listen,” Amys said. Her small smile was a touch amused, a touch wry.
Lan’s face might as well have been carved from thunderclouds. Small wonder, if the Wise Ones had used the Power on him. What was Moiraine doing in there?
“Rhuarc,” Rand said, “how am I supposed to unite the Aiel? They don’t even want to look at me.” He raised his bare forearms for a moment; the Dragons’ scales glittered in the harsh sunlight. “These say I’m He Who Comes With the Dawn, but everybody practically melted away as soon as I showed the things.”
“It is one thing to know prophecy will be fulfilled, eventually,” the clan chief said slowly, “another to see that fulfillment begun before your eyes. It is said you will make the clans one people again, as long ago, but we have fought one another almost as long as we have fought the rest of the world. And there is more, for some of us.”
He will bind you together, and destroy you. Rhuarc must have heard that, too. And the other clan chiefs, and the Wise Ones, if they also had entered that forest of shining glass columns. If Moiraine had not arranged a special vision for him. “Does everyone see the same things inside those columns, Rhuarc?”
“No!” Melaine snapped, eyes like green steel. “Be silent, or send Aan’allein and Matrim away. You must go, too, Egwene.”
“It is not permitted,” Amys said in a just slightly softer voice, “to speak of what occurs within Rhuidean except with those who have been there.” A fraction softer, maybe. “Even then, few speak of it, and seldom.”
“I mean to change what is permitted and what isn’t,” Rand told them levelly. “Become used to it.” He caught Egwene muttering about him needing his ears boxed, and grinned at her. “Egwene can stay, too, since she asked so nicely.” She stuck her tongue out at him, then blushed when she realized what she had done.
“Change,” Rhuarc said. “You know he brings change, Amys. It is wondering what change, and how, that makes us like children alone in the dark. Since it must be, let it begin now. No two clan chiefs I have spoken with have seen through the exactly same eyes, Rand, or exactly the same things, until the sharing of water, and the meeting where the Agreement of Rhuidean was made. Whether it is the same for Wise Ones, I do not know, but I suspect it is. I think it is a matter of bloodlines. I believe I saw through the eyes of my ancestors, and you yours.”
Amys and the other Wise Ones glowered in grimly sullen silence. Mat and Egwene wore equally confused stares. Lan alone seemed not to be listening at all; his eyes looked inward, no doubt in worry over Moiraine.
Rand felt a little strange himself. Seeing through his ancestors’ eyes. He had known for some time that Tam al’Thor was not his real father, that he had been found as a newborn on the slopes of Dragonmount after the last major battle of the Aiel War. A newborn with his dead mother, a Maiden of the Spear. He had claimed Aiel blood in demanding admittance to Rhuidean, but the fact of it was just now being driven home. His ancestors. Aiel.
“Then you saw Rhuidean just begun building, too,” he said. “And the two Aes Sedai. You … heard what the one of them said.” He will destroy you.
“I heard.” Rhuarc looked resigned, like a man who had learned his leg had to be cut off. “I know.”
Rand changed the subject. “What was ‘the sharing of water’?”
The clan chief’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You did not recognize it? But then, I do not see why you should; you have not grown up with the histories. According the oldest stories, from the day the Breaking of the World began until the day we first entered the Three-fold Land, only one people did not attack us. One people allowed us water freely when it was needed. It took us long to discover who they were. That is done with, now. The pledge of peace was destroyed; the treekillers spat in our faces.”
“Cairhien,” Rand said. “You’re talking about Cairhien, and Avendoral-dera, and Laman cutting down the Tree.”
“Laman is dead for his punishment,” Rhuarc said in a flat voice. “The oathbreakers are done with.” He looked at Rand sideways. “Some, such as Couladin, take it for proof we can trust no one who is not Aiel. That is a part of why he hates you. A part of it. He will take your face and blood for lies. Or claim he does.”
Rand shook his head. Moiraine sometimes talked of the complexity of Age Lace, the Pattern of an Age, woven by the Wheel of Time from the thread of human lives. If the ancestors of the Cairhienin had not allowed the Aiel to have water three thousand years ago, then Cairhien would never have been given the right to use the Silk Path across the Waste, with a cutting from Avendesora for a pledge. No pledge, and King Laman would have had no Tree to cut down; there would have been no Aiel War; and he could not have been born on the side of Dragonmount to be carried off and raised in the Two Rivers. How many more points like that had there been, where a single decision one way or another affected the weave of the Pattern for thousands of years? A thousand times a thousand tiny branching points, a thousand times that many, all twitching the Pattern into a different design. He himself was a walking branching point, and maybe Mat and Perrin, too. What they did or did not do would send ripples ahead through the years, through the Ages.
He looked at Mat, hobbling up the slope with the aid of his spear, head down and eyes squinted in pain. The Creator could not have been thinking, to set the future on the shoulders of three farmboys. I can’t drop it. I have to carry the load, whatever the cost.
At the Wise Ones’ low, wall-less tents, the women ducked inside with murmurs about water and shade. They all but pulled Mat with them; as evidence of how his head and throat hurt, he not only obeyed, he did so silently.
Rand started to follow, but Lan laid a hand on his shoulder. “Did you see her in there?” the Warder asked.
“No, Lan. I’m sorry; I did not. She’ll come out safe if anyone can.”
Lan grunted and took his hand away. “Watch out for Couladin, Rand. I have seen his kind before. Ambition burns in his belly. He would sacrifice the world to achieve it.”
“Aan’allein speaks the truth,” Rhuarc said. “The Dragons on your arms will not matter if you are dead before the clan chiefs learn of them. I will make sure some of Heirn’s Jindo are always near you until we reach Cold Rocks. Even then, Couladin will probably try to make trouble, and the Shaido, at least, will follow him. Perhaps others, too. The Prophecy of Rhuidean said you would be raised by those not of the blood, yet Couladin may not be the only one to see only a wetlander.”
“I will try to watch my back,” Rand said dryly. In the stories, when somebody fulfilled a prophecy, everyone cried “Behold!” or some such, and that was that except for dealing with the villains. Real life did not seem to work that way.
When they entered the tent, Mat was already seated on a gold-tasseled red cushion with his coat and shirt off. A woman in a cowled white robe had finished washing the blood from his face and was just beginning on his chest. Amys gripped a stone mortar between her knees, blending some ointment with a pestle, while Bair and Seana had their heads together over herbs brewing in a pot of hot water.
Melaine grimaced at Lan and Rhuarc then fixed Rand with cool green eyes. “Strip to the waist,” she said curtly. “The cuts on your head do not seem too bad, but let me see what has you hunched over.” She struck a small brass gong, and another white-robed woman ducked in at the back of the tent, a steaming silver basin in her hands and cloths over her arm.
Rand took a seat on a cushion, making himself sit up straight. “That’s nothing to worry yourself about,” he assured her. The second woman in white knelt gracefully by his side and, resisting his efforts to take the damp cloth she wrung out in the basin, began gently washing his face. He wondered who she was. She looked Aiel, but she certainly did not act it. Her gray eyes held a determined meekness.
“It is an old injury,” Egwene told the sun-haired Wise One. “Moiraine has never been able t
o Heal it properly.” The look she gave Rand said common courtesy should have made him tell as much. From the glances that passed among the Wise Ones, though, he thought she had said more than enough already. A wound Aes Sedai could not Heal; that was a puzzle to them. Moiraine seemed to know more about him than he knew about himself, and he had a hard time dealing with her. Maybe it would go easier with the Wise Ones if they had to guess about him.
Mat winced as Amys began rubbing her ointment into the slashes on his chest. If it felt anything like it smelled, Rand thought he had cause to wince. Bair shoved a silver cup at Mat. “Drink, young man. Timsin root and silverleaf will help your headaches if anything can.”
He did not hesitate before gulping it down; a shudder and a twisted face followed. “Tastes like the inside of my boots.” But he gave her a seated bow, formal enough for a Tairen except for his being shirtless, and only spoiled a bit by his sudden grin. “I thank you, Wise One. And I won’t ask if you added anything just to give it that … memorable … taste.” Bair and Seana’s soft laughter might have come because they had or because they had not, but it seemed that as usual Mat had found a way to get on the good of side of the women. Even Melaine gave him a brief smile.
“Rhuarc,” Rand said, “if Couladin thinks to make difficulties, I need to jump ahead of him. How do I go about telling the other clan chiefs? About me. About these.” He shifted his Dragon-twined arms. The white-robed woman at his side, cleaning the long gash in his hair now, deliberately avoided looking at them.
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