He kept a jaunty pace till he was in sight of the windowless purple wagon, and then he missed a step. A cluster of acrobats, four limber men who called themselves the Chavana brothers though it was plain as their noses they came from different countries, not just different mothers, rushed out of a green wagon nearby, shouting and gesturing wildly at one another. They spared a glance for the purple wagon and another for Mat, but they were too engrossed in their argument, and trotting too fast, for more. Gorderan was leaning against one of the purple wheels, scratching his head and frowning at the two women who stood at the foot of the wagon’s wooden steps. Two women. Both swathed in dark cloaks, faces concealed, yet there was no mistaking the flowered head scarf hanging out of the taller woman’s cowl. Well. He should have know Tuon would want her maid along. Noblewomen never went anywhere without a maid. Bet a penny or bet a crown, in the end it all came down to a toss of the dice just the same. They had had their chance to betray him. Still, he was betting on a woman making the same choice twice running. On two women doing it. What fool would make odds on that? But he had to toss the dice. Except, they were already rolling.
He met Selucia’s cold blue stare with a smile and swept off his hat to make an elegant leg to Tuon. Not too showy, with just a small flourish of his cloak. “Are you ready to go shopping?” He very nearly called her “my Lady,” but until she was willing to say his name. . . .
“I have been ready for an hour, Toy,” Tuon drawled coolly. Casually lifting an edge of his cloak, she glanced at the red silk lining and eyed his coat before letting the cloak fall. “Lace suits you. Perhaps I will have lace added to your robes if I make you a cupbearer.”
His smile slipped for an instant. Could she still make him da’covale if she married him? He would have to ask Egeanin. Light, why did women never make it easy?
“Do you want me to come along, my Lord?” Gorderan asked slowly, not quite looking at the women now. He tucked his thumbs behind his belt and did not quite look at Mat, either. “Just to carry, maybe?”
Tuon did not say a word. She just stood there looking up at Mat, waiting, big eyes getting cooler by the second. The dice bounced and rattled in his head. Well, he only hesitated a heartbeat before jerking his head to send the Redarm away. Maybe two heartbeats. He had to trust his luck. Trust her word. Trust is the sound of death. He stepped on that thought hard. This was no song, and no old memory could guide him. The dice inside his skull kept spinning.
With a slight bow, he offered his arm, which Tuon examined as if she had never seen an arm before, pursing those full lips. Then she gathered her cloak and set off with Selucia gliding at her heels, leaving him to hurry after them. No, women never did make it easy.
Despite the early hour, two burly fellows with cudgels were already guarding the entrance, and a third with a clear glass pitcher to take the coins and dump them through a slot in the iron-strapped box on the ground. Each of the three looked too clumsy to palm a copper without falling on his face, but Luca took no chances. Twenty or thirty people were already waiting inside the heavy ropes that led to the big blue banner naming Lucas show, and unfortunately, Latelle was there, too, stern-faced in a dress sewn with crimson spangles and a cloak sewn with blue. Lucas wife trained bears. Mat thought the bears did their tricks for fear she might bite them.
“I have everything in hand,” he told her. “Believe me, there’s nothing to worry about.” He might as well have spared his breath.
Latelle ignored him, frowning worriedly at Tuon and Selucia. She and her husband were the only two showfolk who knew who they were. There had seemed no reason to tell either about this morning’s jaunt. Luca, at least, would have had kittens. The stare Latelle shifted to Mat was not worried, just stone hard. “Remember,” she said quietly, “if you send us to the gallows, you send yourself.” Then she sniffed and went back to studying the people waiting to get in. Latelle was even better than Luca at judging the weight of a purse before the drawstrings were undone. She was also ten times tougher than her husband. The dice tumbled on. Whatever had set them spinning, he had not yet reached the fateful point. The deciding point.
“She is a good wife for Master Luca,” Tuon murmured when they had gone a little way.
Mat looked at her sideways, and resettled his hat on his head. There had been no mockery in her tone. Did she hate Luca that much? Or was she saying what sort of wife she would be? Or . . . ? Burn him, he could go as crazy as Domon thought he was, trying to puzzle this woman out. She had to be the reason for the feel of dice in his head. What was she going to do?
It was a short walk away from the rising sun to the town, along a hard-packed road through hills that were treeless here, but people dotted the road the way windmills and salt pans dotted the hills. Staring straight ahead, they moved so purposefully they seemed not to see anyone in front of them. Mat dodged a round-faced man who nearly walked right into him, which made him have to jump away from a white-haired old fellow making a good speed on spindly legs. That put him in front of a plump girl who would have run up the front of him if he had not jumped again.
“Are you practicing a dance, Toy?” Tuon said, peering up at him over a slim shoulder. Her breath made a faint white mist in front of her cowl. “It isn’t very graceful.”
He opened his mouth, just to point out how crowded the road was, and suddenly he realized he could no longer see anyone beyond her and Selucia. The people who had been there were just gone, the road empty as far as he could see before it made a bend. Slowly, he turned his head. There was no one between him and the show, either, just the folk waiting in line, and that looked no longer than before. Beyond the show, the road wound into the hills toward a distant forest, empty. Not a soul in sight. He pressed fingers against his chest, feeling the foxhead medallion through his coat. Just a piece of silver on a rawhide cord. He wished it felt cold as ice. Tuon arched an eyebrow. Selucia’s stare named him fool.
“I can’t buy you a dress standing here,” he said. That was the point of this expedition, his promise to find Tuon something better than dresses that hung on her and made her look a child in a grownup’s clothing. At least, he was pretty sure he had promised that, and she was perfectly certain. The needlework of the show’s seamstresses met with Tuon’s approval, but not the cloth they had available. Performers’ costumes glittered with spangles and beads and bright colors, but the cloth was usually whatever could be found cheaply. Those who had better kept it and used it till it wore out. Jurador made its money from salt, though, and salt made a great deal of money. The town’s shops should offer any sort of material a woman could wish.
There was no finger-wiggling, this time. Tuon shared a look with Selucia. The taller woman shook her head, a wry, rueful twist to her mouth. Tuon shook her head. And they gathered their cloaks and started toward the town’s iron-studded gates. Women! He hurried to catch up again. They were his prisoners, after all. They were. Their shadows stretched out long in front of them. Had any of those people cast shadows before they vanished? He could not recall any of them breathing a mist, either. It hardly seemed to matter. They were gone, and he was not going to think about where they had come from or where they had gone. Probably something to do with being ta’veren. He was going to put it out of his head. He was. The dice rattling away left room for nothing else.
The gate guards seemed incurious about strangers, or at least about a man and two women afoot. Hard-faced fellows in white-painted breastplates and conical helmets with what looked like horsetails for crests, they ran impassive eyes over the cloaked women, lingering suspiciously a moment on Mat for some reason, and then returned to leaning on their halberds and staring blankly at the road. They were local men, most likely, in any case not Seanchan. The salt merchants and the local lady, Aethelaine, who apparently said whatever the salt merchants told her to, had sworn the Oaths of Return without hesitation and offered to pay a salt tax before they were asked. No doubt the Seanchan would get around to installing some sort of official h
ere eventually, just to keep an eye on everything, but for the moment, they had more important uses for their soldiers. Mat had sent Thorn and Juilin both to make sure there were no Seanchan in Jurador before agreeing to this excursion. A fool could trip over his own luck if he was not careful.
It was a prosperous, busy town, Jurador, with stonepaved streets, most of them wide and all lined with stone buildings roofed in reddish tiles. Houses and inns rubbed shoulders with stables and taverns, in a noisy jumble with a blacksmith’s clanging hammer on an anvil here and the racketing of a rugweaver’s looms there, and everywhere, it seemed, coopers hammering bands on tight barrels for transporting salt. Hawkers cried pins and ribbons, meat pies and roasted nuts from trays, or winter-wrinkled turnips and sorry plums from barrows. On every street men and women stood guard over the display goods on narrow tables in front of their shops and bellowed lists of what was offered within.
Picking out the salt merchants’ houses was easy, though, three stories of stone rather than two, covering eight times as much ground as any others, each with a columned walk overlooking the street and shielded by white wrought-iron screens between the columns. The lower windows on most houses had those screens, though not always painted. That much was reminiscent of Ebou Dar, but little else was, beyond the olive complexions of the people. There were no deep necklines exposing cleavage here, no skirts sewn up to display colored petticoats. The women wore embroidered dresses with high necks right up to their chins, a little embroidery for the common folk, a great deal for the richer, who wore cloaks embroidered top to bottom and sheer veils hanging over their faces from combs of gold-work or carved ivory stuck into dark, coiled braids. The men’s short coats were worked almost as thickly, in colors just as bright, and rich or poor, most men wore a long belt knife with a blade a little less curved than those in Ebou Dar. Rich or poor, the fellows did have a tendency to fondle their knife hilts as if expecting a fight, so maybe that was the same.
The Lady Aethelaine’s palace appeared no different from the outside than the salt merchants’ mansions, but it was located on the town’s main square, a wide expanse of polished stone where a broad round marble fountain sprayed water into the air. People filled their buckets and big pottery water jars from pipes spilling into stone basins at the corners of other squares, though. The big fountain put out a smell of brine. It was a symbol of Jurador’s wealth, pumped from the same source as the salt wells in the surrounding hills. Mat got to see a good deal of the town before the sun climbed even halfway to its noon peak.
Every time Tuon and Selucia spotted a shop with silks displayed out front, they stopped at the long narrow table to feel bolts of cloth and whisper with their heads together, waving off the attentions of the watchful shopkeeper. Those kept a very watchful eye, until they realized Mat was with the two women. In their stout woolens, well worn and badly fitting, they did not look customers for silk. Mat, with one side of his cloak thrown back to expose the lining, did. Whenever he tried to show an interest, though - women said they wanted you to show an interest! - whenever he got close enough to hear what they were saying, the women fell silent and looked at him, cool dark eyes and cool blue staring out of their deep cowls, until he fell back a step or two. Then Selucia would bend her head to Tuon’s, and they would go back to murmuring and fingering silk, red silk, blue silk, green silk, smooth shimmering silk and brocaded silk. Jurador was a very wealthy town. Luckily, he had tucked a fat purse of gold into his coat pocket. None of it seemed to be right, though.
Inevitably, Tuon shook her head, and the pair of them glided away into the crowd with Mat hurrying to keep up as far as the next shop showing silks. The dice continued to bounce off the inside of his skull.
They were not the only ones from the show who had come into the town. He spotted Aludra, her face framed by beaded braids, walking through the crowd with a gray-haired man who had to be a salt merchant from the amount of bright embroidery covering his silk coat in flowers and hummingbirds. What would the Illuminator want with a salt merchant? Whatever she was saying to him, his pleased smile had added a few creases to his face, and he was nodding.
Tuon shook her head, and the two women glided toward the next shop, ignoring the shopkeeper’s deep bows. Well, most of those were directed at Mat. Maybe the skinny fool thought he wanted to buy silk for himself. Not that he would have passed up a new silk coat or three, but who could think about coats when he was waiting for those bloody dice to stop? Just a little embroidery, on the sleeves and shoulders.
Thorn went by clutching his bronze-colored cloak around him, knuckling his long white mustaches and yawning as if he had spent the night awake. He might have. The gleeman had not taken to drink again, but Lopin and Nerim complained about him remaining awake till all hours, burning a lamp so he could read and re-read his precious letter. What could be so fascinating in a letter from a dead woman? A dead woman. Light, maybe those people on the road . . . ! No; he was not going to think about that at all.
Tuon plucked one fold of silk and let it drop as she turned away without trying another. Selucia gave the stout shopkeeper such a stare before following that the woman started back in affront. Mat offered her a smile. Affronted shopkeepers could lead to town guards asking questions, and who could say where that might lead? He knew he could smile most women into feeling soothed. The round-faced woman sniffed at him and bent to smoothing the bolt of silk as tenderly as tucking in a babe. Most women, he thought sourly.
Down the street, a woman in a plain cloak let her hood fall back, and Mat’s breath caught in his throat. Edesina lifted her cowl again, but she took no hurry with it, and the damage was done anyway, an Aes Sedai’s ageless face displayed for anyone who knew what they were seeing. No one in the street gave a sign that they had noticed anything, but he could not see every face. Was anyone thinking of a reward? There might be no Seanchan in Jurador at the moment, but they did pass through.
Edesina glided around a corner, and two dark-cloaked shapes followed her. Two. Had the sul’dam left only one of their number in the camp to watch two Aes Sedai? Or maybe Joline or Teslyn was somewhere close by, and he had missed seeing her. He craned his neck, searching the throng for another plain cloak, but every one he saw had at least a little embroidery.
Abruptly, it hit him like a stone between the eyes. Every cloak he could see had at least a little embroidery. Where were bloody Tuon and bloody Selucia? Were the dice spinning faster?
Breathing hard, he went up on his toes, but the street was a river of embroidered cloaks, embroidered coats and dresses. It did not mean they were trying to escape. Tuon had given her word; she had passed up a perfect chance for betrayal. But all either woman had to do was say three words, and anyone who heard them likely would recognize a Seanchan accent. That might be sufficient to set the hounds on his trail. There were two shops ahead that seemed to be offering cloth, one on either side of the street. Neither with a pair of dark-cloaked women at the tables out front. They could have turned a corner easily enough, but he had to trust to luck. His luck was especially good when the game was random. Bloody women probably thought it was a bloody game. Burn him, let his luck run good.
Closing his eyes, he spun in a circle in the middle of the street and took a step. At random. He bumped into someone solid, hard enough to make them both grunt. A bulky fellow with a small mouth and a little poorly done scrollwork on the shoulders of his rough coat stood glaring at him when he opened his eyes, glaring and fingering the hilt of his curved knife. Mat did not care. He was facing straight at one of the two shops. Pulling his hat down tight, he ran. The dice were rolling faster.
Divided shelves stuffed with bolts of cloth lined the walls of the shop from floor to ceiling, and more stood stacked on long tables out in the floor. The shopkeeper was a scrawny woman with a large mole on her chin, her assistant slim and pretty and angry-eyed. He dashed inside just in time to hear the shopkeeper say, “For the last time, if you won’t tell me what you’re here for, I’
m going to send Nelsa for the guards.” Tuon and Selucia, faces still hidden in their hoods, were walking slowly along one wall full of cloth, stopping to touch a bolt but neither paying the shopkeeper any heed.
“They’re with me,” Mat said breathlessly. Tugging the purse from his pocket, he tossed it on the nearest clear table. The heavy clink it made landing put a wide smile on the shopkeeper’s narrow face. “Give them whatever they want,” he told her. And to Tuon, he added firmly, “If you’re going to buy anything, it’s going to be here. I’ve had all the exercise I care for this morning.”
He would have had the words back as soon as they left his mouth, if he could. Speak to a woman that way, and she flared in your face like one of Aludra’s firesticks, every time. But Tuon’s big eyes looked up at him from the shelter of her hood. And her full mouth curved slightly in a smile. It was a secret smile, for herself, not him. The Light only knew what it meant. He hated it when women did that. At least the dice had not stopped. That had to be a good sign, right?
Tuon had no need of words to make her choices, silently pointing out bolt after bolt and measuring with her small dark hands how much the shopkeeper was to cut off with her shears. The woman did the work herself instead of delegating it to her assistant, and well she might, considering. Red silk in several shades went under those long sharp scissors, and green silk in a few shades, and more varieties of blue silk than Mat knew existed. Tuon chose out some fine linen in several thicknesses, and lengths of bright wool - she consulted Selucia over those in muffled whispers - but mostly it was silk. He got back much less of his purse than he had expected.
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