He expected an explosion, but Egeanin immediately fumbled open the clasp and pushed her heavy wig back to fasten it behind her neck. Her face might have been molded from snow for all the expression on it.
“Turn,” Selucia commanded, and it was a command, without any doubt. “Let me see.”
Egeanin turned. Stiff as a fence post, but she turned.
Setalle looked at her intently, with a puzzled shake of her head, then gave Mat a different head shake before returning to her embroidery. Women had as many ways of shaking their heads as they had looks. This one said he was a fool, and if he did not catch the finer nuances, he was just as glad. He did not think he would have liked them. Burn him, he bought a necklace for Tuon, who gave it to Selucia right in front of him, and now it was Egeanin’s?
“She came for a new name,” Tuon said musingly. “What does she call herself?”
“Leilwin,” Selucia replied. “A fitting name for a shea dancer. Leilwin Shipless, perhaps?”
Tuon nodded. “Leilwin Shipless.”
Egeanin jerked as though every word was a slap. “May I withdraw?” she asked stiffly, bending in sharp bow.
“If you want to go, then go,” Mat growled. Bringing her in the first place had not been the best notion he ever had, but maybe he could recover a little without her.
Eyes locked on the floorboards, Egeanin sank to her knees. “Please, may I withdraw?”
Tuon sat there straight-backed on the floor staring through the taller woman, clearly not seeing her at all. Selucia eyed Egeanin up and down, pursing her lips. Setalle pushed her needle through the cloth stretched on her hoop. No one so much as glanced at Mat.
Egeanin dropped to her face, and Mat bit back a startled oath when she kissed the floor. “Please,” she said hoarsely, “I beg leave to withdraw.”
“You will go, Leilwin,” Selucia said, cold as a queen speaking to a chickenthief, “and you will not let me see your face again unless it is covered by a shea dancer’s veil.”
Egeanin scrambled backward on hands and knees and all but tumbled out the door, so fast that Mat was left gaping.
With an effort, he managed to regain his smile. There seemed little point in staying, but a man could make a graceful exit. “Well, I suppose—”
Tuon wriggled her fingers again, still not looking at him, and Selucia cut him short. “The High Lady is weary, Toy. You have her permission to go.”
“Look, my name is Mat,” he said. “An easy name. A simple name. Mat.” Tuon might as well have been a porcelain doll in truth for all the response she made.
Setalle set down her embroidery, though, and rose with one hand resting lightly on the hilt of the curved dagger stuck behind her belt. “Young man, if you think you’re going to lounge about till you get to see us readying for bed, you’re sadly mistaken.” She smiled saying it, but she did have her hand on her knife, and she was Ebou Dari enough to stick a man on a whim. Tuon remained an unmoving doll, a queen on her throne somehow mistakenly dressed in ill-fitting clothes. Mat left.
Egeanin was leaning on one hand against the side of the wagon, her head hanging. Her other hand was gripping the necklace around her throat. Harnan moved, a little way off in the darkness, just to show he was still there. A wise man, to keep clear of Egeanin just then. Mat was too irritated for wisdom.
“What was that about?” he demanded. “You don’t have to go on your knees to Tuon anymore. And Selucia? She’s a bloody lady’s maid! I don’t know anybody who’d jump for his queen the way you jumped for her.”
Egeanin’s hard face was shadowed, but her voice was haggard. “The High Lady is . . . who she is. Selucia is her so’jhin. No one of the low Blood would dare meet her so’jhin’s eyes, and maybe not the High Blood, either.” The clasp broke with a metallic snap as she jerked the necklace free. “But then, I’m not of any Blood, now.” Rearing back, she put her whole body into throwing the necklace as far into the night as she could.
Mat opened his mouth. He could have bought a dozen prime horses with what he paid for that thing and had coin left. He closed it again without saying a word. He might not always be wise, but he was wise enough to know when a woman really might try to stick a knife in him. He knew another thing, as well. If Egeanin behaved this way around Tuon and Selucia, then he had better make sure the sul’dam were kept clear. The Light only knew what they would do if Tuon started wiggling her fingers.
That left him with a job of work to do. Well, he hated work, but those old memories had his head stuffed full of battles. He hated battle, too—a man could get killed dead!—but it was better than work. Strategy and tactics. Learn the ground, learn your enemy, and if you could not win one way, you found another.
The next night he returned to the purple wagon, alone, and once Olver had finished his lesson in stones from Tuon, Mat inveigled his way into a game. At first, sitting on the floor across the board from the dark little woman, he was not sure whether to win or lose. Some women liked to win every time, but the man had to make her work for it. Some liked the man to win, or at least more often than he lost. Neither made any sense to him—he liked to win, and the easier, the better—but that was how it was. While he was dithering, Tuon took matters out of his hands. Halfway through the game, he realized she had him in a trap he could not get out of. Her white stones were cutting off his black everywhere. It was a clean and resounding win for her.
“You don’t play very well, Toy,” she said mockingly. Despite the tone, her big, liquid eyes considered him coolly, weighing and measuring. A man could drown in eyes like that.
He smiled and made his goodbyes before there could be any thought of kicking him out. Strategy. Think to the future. Do the unexpected. The next night, he brought a small red paper flower made by one of the show’s seamstresses. And presented it to a startled Selucia. Setalle’s eyebrows rose, and even Tuon seemed taken aback. Tactics. Put your opponent off balance. Come to think, women and battles were not that different. Both wrapped a man in fog and could him kill him without trying. If he was careless.
Every night he visited the purple wagon for a game of stones under Setalle and Selucia’s watchful eyes, and he concentrated on the crosshatched board. Tuon was very good, and it was all too easy to find himself watching the way she placed her stones, with her fingers bent back in a curiously graceful way. She was used to having fingernails an inch long and taking care not to break them. Her eyes were a danger, too. You needed a clear head in stones or battle, and her gaze seemed to reach inside his skull. He buckled down to the game, though, and managed to win four of the next seven, with one draw. Tuon was satisfied when she won and determined when she lost, with none of the temper tantrums he had feared, no scathing comments aside from insisting on calling him Toy, not very much of that icy regal hauteur, as long as they were playing anyway. She purely enjoyed the game, laughing exultantly when she pulled him into a trap, laughing in delight when he managed a clever placement to escape. She seemed a different woman once she lost herself in the stones board.
A flower sewn from blue linen followed the paper blossom, and two days later, a pink silk bloom that spread out as wide as a woman’s palm. Both handed to Selucia. Her blue eyes increasingly set in a suspicious frown when they rested on him, but Tuon told her she could keep the flowers, and she stored them away carefully, folded in a linen cloth. He let three days pass without a present, then brought a little cluster of red silk rosebuds, complete with short stems and glistening leaves that looked as real as nature, only more perfect. He had asked the seamstress to make it on the day he bought that first paper flower.
Selucia took a step, reaching to accept the rosebuds with a curl to her lip, but he sat down and put the flowers beside the board, a little toward Tuon. He said nothing, just left it lying there. She never so much as glanced at it. Dipping into the small leather bags that held the stones, he plucked one from each and shuffled them between his hands till even he was unsure which was where, then offered his closed fists. Tuon hesitated a
moment, studying his face with no expression, then tapped his left hand. He opened it to display the glistening white stone.
“I’ve changed my mind, Toy,” she murmured, placing the white stone carefully on the intersection of two lines near the center of the board. “You play very well.”
Mat blinked. Could she know what he was up to? Selucia was standing at Tuon’s back, seemingly absorbed in the almost empty board. Setalle turned a page in her book and shifted a little to get a better light. Of course not. She was talking about stones. If she even suspected his real game, she would toss him out on his ear. Any woman would. It had to be the stones.
That was the night they played to a draw, with each of them controlling half the board in irregular pools and patches. In truth, she won a victory.
“I have kept my word, Toy,” she drawled as he was replacing the stones in the bags. “No attempts to escape, no attempts at betrayal. This is confining.” She gestured around at the interior of the wagon. “I wish to take walks. After dark will do. You may accompany me.” Her eyes touched the cluster of rosebuds, then rose to his face. “To make sure I don’t run away.”
Setalle marked her place with a slim finger and looked at him. Selucia stood behind Tuon and looked at him. The woman had kept her word, mad as that seemed. Walks after dark, with most of the showfolk already in their beds, would do no harm, not with him there to make sure. So why did he feel that he was losing control of the situation?
Tuon agreed to go cloaked and hooded, which was something of a relief. The black hair was growing back in on her shaved scalp, but so far it was little more than long fuzz, and unlike Selucia, who very likely slept in her head scarf, Tuon had shown no inclination to cover her head. A child-sized woman with hair shorter than any man not going bald would have been remarked even in the night. Setalle and Selucia always followed at a little distance in the darkness, the lady’s maid to keep a protective eye on her mistress and Setalle to keep an eye on the maid. At least, he thought that was how it was. Sometimes it seemed they were both watching him. The two of them were awfully friendly for guard and prisoner. He had overheard Setalle cautioning Selucia that he was a rogue with women, a fine thing for her to be saying! And Selucia had calmly replied that her lady would break his arms if he showed any disrespect, just as if they were not prisoners at all.
He thought to use these walks to learn a little more about Tuon—she did not talk much over a stones board—but she had a way of ignoring what he asked or deflecting the subject, usually to him.
“The Two Rivers is all forests and farms,” he said as they strolled along the main street of the show. Clouds hid the moon, and the colorful wagons were indistinguishable dark shapes, the performers’ platforms lining the street merely shadows. “Everybody grows tabac and raises sheep. My father breeds cows, too, and trades horses, but mostly, it’s tabac and sheep from one end to the other.”
“Your father trades horses,” Tuon murmured. “And what do you do, Toy?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the two women ghosting along ten paces back. Setalle might not be close enough to hear, if he kept his voice down, but he decided to be honest. Besides, the show was dead quiet in the darkness. She might hear, and she knew what he had been doing in Ebou Dar. “I’m a gambler,” he said.
“My father called himself a gambler,” Tuon said softly. “He died of a bad wager.”
And how were you supposed to find out what that meant?
Another night, walking along a row of animal cages, each one built to fill an entire wagon, he said, “What do you do for fun, Tuon? Just because you enjoy it. Aside from playing stones.” He could almost feel Selucia bristling at his use of her name from thirty feet away, but Tuon did not seem to mind. He thought she did not.
“I train horses and damane,” she said, peering into a cage that held a sleeping lion. The animal was only a large shadow lying on the straw behind the thick bars. “Does he really have a black mane? There are no lions with black manes in all of Seanchan.”
She trained damane? For fun? Light! “Horses? What kind of horses?” It might be warhorses, if she trained bloody damane. For fun.
“Mistress Anan tells me you’re a scoundrel, Toy.” Her voice was cool, not cold. Composed. She turned toward him, face hidden in the shadows of her cowl. “How many women have you kissed?” The lion woke up and coughed, a deep sound guaranteed to raise the hair on anyone’s head. Tuon did not even flinch.
“Looks like rain’s coming again,” he said weakly. “Selucia will have my hide if I get you back soaked.” He heard her laugh softly. What had he said that was funny?
There was a price to pay, of course. Maybe things were going his way and maybe not, but when you thought they were, there was always a price.
“Bunch of chattering magpies,” he complained to Egeanin. The afternoon sat on the horizon, a red-gold ball half hidden by clouds, casting the show in long shadows. There was no rain, for once, and in spite of the cold they were sitting hunched beneath the green wagon they shared, playing stones in plain sight of anyone who walked by. A good many did, men hurrying about some last-minute chore, children snatching the final chance to roll hoops through the mud puddles and toss balls before night fell. Women holding their skirts up glanced at the wagon in passing, and even when they were hooded, Mat knew what their expressions were. Hardly a woman in the show would speak to Mat Cauthon. Irritably, he rattled the black stones he held gathered in his left hand. “They’ll get their gold when we reach Lugard. That’s all they ought to care about. They shouldn’t be poking their noses into my business.”
“You can hardly blame them,” Egeanin drawled, studying the board. “You and I are supposed to be fleeing lovers, but you spend more time with . . . her . . . than with me.” She still had trouble not calling Tuon High Lady. “You behave like a man courting.” She reached to place her stone, then stopped with her hand above the board. “You can’t think she’ll complete the ceremony, can you? You can’t be that big a fool.”
“What ceremony? What are you talking about?”
“You named her your wife three times that night in Ebou Dar,” she said slowly. “You really don’t know? A woman says three times that a man is her husband, and he says three times she’s his wife, and they’re married. There are blessings involved, usually, but it’s saying it in front of witnesses that makes it a marriage. You really didn’t know?”
Mat laughed, and shrugged his shoulders, feeling the knife hanging behind his neck. A good knife gave a man a feeling of comfort. But his laugh was hoarse. “But she didn’t say anything.” He had bloody well been stuffing a gag in her mouth at the time! “So whatever I said, it doesn’t mean anything.” But he knew what Egeanin was going to say. Sure as water was wet, he knew. He had been told who he was going to marry.
“With the Blood, it’s a little different. Sometimes a noble from one end of the Empire marries a noble from the other. An arranged marriage. The Imperial family never has any other kind. They may not want to wait until they can be together, so one acknowledges the marriage where she is, and the other where he is. As long as they both speak in front of witnesses, inside a year and a day, the marriage is legal. You truly didn’t know?”
Sure was sure, but the stones still spilled from his hand onto the board, bouncing everywhere. The bloody girl knew. Maybe she thought this whole thing was an adventure, or a game. Maybe she thought being kidnapped was as much fun as training horses or bloody damane! But he knew he was a trout waiting for her to set the hook.
He stayed away from the purple wagon for two days. There was no use running—he already had the bloody hook in his mouth, and he had put it there himself—but he did not have to swallow the flaming thing. Only, he knew it was just a matter of when she decided to jerk the line tight.
As slowly as the show moved, eventually they reached the ferry across the Eldar, running from Alkindar on the west bank to Coramen on the east, tidy little walled towns of tile-roofed stone buildings with half
a dozen stone docks each. The sun was climbing high, hardly a cloud crossed the sky, and those white as new-washed wool. No rain today, maybe. It was an important crossing, with trading ships from upriver tied to some of the docks and big barge-like ferries crawling from one town to the other on long sweeps. The Seanchan apparently thought so, too. They had military camps outside both towns, and from the stone walls beginning to rise around the camps and the stone structures going up inside, they had no intention of leaving soon.
Mat crossed over with the first wagons, riding Pips. The brown gelding looked ordinary enough to an undiscerning eye; it would not seem out of place for him to be ridden by a fellow in a rough woolen coat with a woolen cap pulled down over his ears against the cold. He was not actually considering making a run for the hilly wooded ridge country behind Coramen. Thinking about it, but not really considering. She was going to set the hook whether he ran or not. So he sat Pips at the end of one of the stone ferry landings, watching the show cross over and trundle away through the town. There were Seanchan on the landings, a squad of beefy men in segmented armor painted blue and burnt gold under a lean young officer with one thin blue plume on his odd-looking helmet. They seemed to be there just to keep order, but the officer checked Luca’s horse warrant, and Luca inquired whether the noble lord might know of ground outside the town suitable for his show to perform. Mat could have wept. He could see soldiers wearing striped armor in the street behind him, wandering in and out of shops and taverns. A raken swooped down out of the sky on long, ribbed wings, alighting outside one of the camps across the river. Three or four of the snake-necked creatures were already on the ground. There had to be hundreds of soldiers in those camps. Maybe a thousand. And Luca was going to put on his show.
Then one of the ferries hit the rope-padded bumpers at the end of the landing, and the ramp came down to let the windowless purple wagon rumble off onto the stones. Setalle was driving. Selucia sat on one side of her, peering out from the hood of a faded red cloak. On the other side, swathed in a dark cloak so not an inch of her showed, was Tuon.
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