The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  Once in the alley, Mat started for the street right away, but Thom caught his arm. “Not so fast,” the gleeman told him. “Not till we know what we’re doing.” Thom lowered the window again as much as he could from outside, and turned to study the alley.

  Rand followed Thom’s eyes. Except for half a dozen rain barrels against the inn and the next building, a tailor shop, the alley was empty, the hard-packed dirt dry and dusty.

  “Why are you doing this?” Mat demanded again. “You’d be safer if you left us. Why are you staying with us?”

  Thom stared at him for a long moment. “I had a nephew, Owyn,” he said wearily, shrugging out of his cloak. He made a pile with his blanketroll as he talked, carefully setting his cased instruments on top. “My brother’s only son, my only living kin. He got in trouble with the Aes Sedai, but I was too busy with . . . other things. I don’t know what I could have done, but when I finally tried, it was too late. Owyn died a few years later. You could say Aes Sedai killed him.” He straightened up, not looking at them. His voice was still level, but Rand glimpsed tears in his eyes as he turned his head away. “If I can keep you two free of Tar Valon, maybe I can stop thinking about Owyn. Wait here.” Still avoiding their eyes, he hurried to the mouth of the alley, slowing before he reached it. After one quick look around, he strolled casually into the street and out of sight.

  Mat half rose to follow, then settled back. “He won’t leave these,” he said, touching the leather instrument cases. “You believe that story?”

  Rand squatted patiently beside the rain barrels. “What’s the matter with you, Mat? You aren’t like this. I haven’t heard you laugh in days.”

  “I don’t like being hunted like a rabbit,” Mat snapped. He sighed, letting his head fall back against the brick wall of the inn. Even like that he seemed tense. His eyes shifted warily. “Sorry. It’s the running, and all these strangers, and . . . and just everything. It makes me jumpy. I look at somebody, and I can’t help wondering if he’s going to tell the Fades about us, or cheat us, or rob us, or. . . . Light, Rand, doesn’t it make you nervous?”

  Rand laughed, a quick bark in the back of his throat. “I’m too scared to be nervous.”

  “What do you think the Aes Sedai did to his nephew?”

  “I don’t know,” Rand said uneasily. There was only one kind of trouble that he knew of for a man to get into with Aes Sedai. “Not like us, I guess.”

  “No. Not like us.”

  For a time they leaned against the wall, not talking. Rand was not sure how long they waited. A few minutes, probably, but it felt like an hour, waiting for Thom to come back, waiting for Bartim and Gelb to open the window and denounce them for Darkfriends. Then a man turned in at the mouth of the alley, a tall man with the hood of his cloak pulled up to hide his face, a cloak black as night against the light of the street.

  Rand scrambled to his feet, one hand wrapped around the hilt of Tam’s sword so hard that his knuckles hurt. His mouth went dry, and no amount of swallowing helped. Mat rose to a crouch with one hand under his cloak.

  The man came closer, and Rand’s throat grew tighter with every step. Abruptly the man stopped and tossed back his cowl. Rand’s knees almost gave way. It was Thom.

  “Well, if you don’t recognize me”—the gleeman grinned—“I guess it’s a good enough disguise for the gates.”

  Thom pushed past them and began transferring things from his patch-covered cloak to his new one so nimbly that Rand could not make out any of them. The new cloak was dark brown, Rand saw now. He drew a deep, ragged breath; his throat still felt as if it were clutched in a fist. Brown, not black. Mat still had his hand under his cloak, and he stared at Thom’s back as if he were thinking of using the hidden dagger.

  Thom glanced up at them, then gave them a sharper look. “This is no time to get skittish.” Deftly he began folding his old cloak into a bundle around his instrument cases, inside out so the patches were hidden. “We’ll walk out of here one at a time, just close enough to keep each other in sight. Shouldn’t be remembered especially, that way. Can’t you slouch?” he added to Rand. “That height of yours is as bad as a banner.” He slung the bundle across his back and stood, drawing his hood back up. He looked nothing like a white-haired gleeman. He was just another traveler, a man too poor to afford a horse, much less a carriage. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

  Rand agreed fervently, but even so he hesitated before stepping out of the alley into the square. None of the sparse scattering of people gave them a second look—most did not look at them at all—but his shoulders knotted, waiting for the cry of Darkfriend that could turn ordinary people into a mob bent on murder. He ran his eyes across the open area, over people moving about on their daily business, and when he brought them back a Myrddraal was halfway across the square.

  Where the Fade had come from, he could not begin to guess, but it strode toward the three of them with a slow deadliness, a predator with the prey under its gaze. People shied away from the black-cloaked shape, avoided looking at it. The square began to empty out as people decided they were needed elsewhere.

  The black cowl froze Rand where he stood. He tried to summon up the void, but it was like fumbling after smoke. The Fade’s hidden gaze knifed to his bones and turned his marrow to icicles.

  “Don’t look at its face,” Thom muttered. His voice shook and cracked, and it sounded as if he were forcing the words out. “The Light burn you, don’t look at its face!”

  Rand tore his eyes away—he almost groaned; it felt like tearing a leech off of his face—but even staring at the stones of the square he could still see the Myrddraal coming, a cat playing with mice, amused at their feeble efforts to escape, until finally the jaws snapped shut. The Fade had halved the distance. “Are we just going to stand here?” he mumbled. “We have to run . . . get away.” But he could not make his feet move.

  Mat had the ruby-hilted dagger out at last, in a trembling hand. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, a snarl and a rictus of fear.

  “Think. . . .” Thom stopped to swallow, and went on hoarsely. “Think you can outrun it, do you, boy?” He began to mutter to himself; the only word Rand could make out was “Owyn.” Abruptly Thom growled, “I never should have gotten mixed up with you boys. Should never have.” He shrugged the bundled gleeman’s cloak off of his back and thrust it into Rand’s arms. “Take care of that. When I say run, you run and don’t stop until you get to Caemlyn. The Queen’s Blessing. An inn. Remember that, in case. . . . Just remember it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rand said. The Myrddraal was not twenty paces away, now. His feet felt like lead weights.

  “Just remember it!” Thom snarled. “The Queen’s Blessing. Now. RUN!”

  He gave them a push, one hand on the shoulder of each of them, to get them started, and Rand stumbled away in a lurching run with Mat at his side.

  “RUN!” Thom sprang into motion, too, with a long, wordless roar. Not after them, but toward the Myrddraal. His hands flourished as if he were performing at his best, and daggers appeared. Rand stopped, but Mat pulled him along.

  The Fade was just as startled. Its leisurely pace faltered in mid-stride. Its hand swept toward the hilt of the black sword hanging at its waist, but the gleeman’s long legs covered the distance quickly. Thom crashed into the Myrddraal before the black blade was half drawn, and both went down in a thrashing heap. The few people still in the square fled.

  “RUN!” The air in the square flashed an eye-searing blue, and Thom began to scream, but even in the middle of the scream he managed a word. “RUN!”

  Rand obeyed. The gleeman’s screams pursued him.

  Clutching Thom’s bundle to his chest, he ran as hard as he could. Panic spread from the square out through the town as Rand and Mat fled on the crest of a wave of fear. Shopkeepers abandoned their goods as the boys passed. Shutters banged down over storefronts, and frightened faces appeared in the windows of houses, then vanished. People
who had not been close enough to see ran through the streets wildly, paying no heed. They bumped into one another, and those who were knocked down scrambled to their feet or were trampled. Whitebridge roiled like a kicked anthill.

  As he and Mat pounded toward the gates, Rand abruptly remembered what Thom had said about his height. Without slowing down, he crouched as best he could without looking as if he was crouching. But the gates themselves, thick wood bound with black iron straps, stood open. The two gatetenders, in steel caps and mail tunics worn over cheap-looking red coats with white collars, fingered their halberds and stared uneasily into the town. One of them glanced at Rand and Mat, but they were not the only ones running out of the gates. A steady stream boiled through, panting men clutching wives, weeping women carrying babes and dragging crying children, pale-faced craftsmen still in their aprons, still heedlessly gripping their tools.

  There would be no one who could tell which way they had gone, Rand thought as he ran, dazed. Thom. Oh, Light save me, Thom.

  Mat staggered beside him, caught his balance, and they ran until the last of the fleeing people had fallen away, ran until the town and the White Bridge were far out of sight behind them.

  Finally Rand fell to his knees in the dust, pulling air raggedly into his raw throat with great gulps. The road behind stretched empty until it was lost to sight among bare trees. Mat plucked at him.

  “Come on. Come on.” Mat panted the words. Sweat and dust streaked his face, and he looked ready to collapse. “We have to keep going.”

  “Thom,” Rand said. He tightened his arms around the bundle of Thom’s cloak; the instrument cases were hard lumps inside. “Thom.”

  “He’s dead. You saw. You heard. Light, Rand, he’s dead!”

  “You think Egwene and Moiraine and the rest are dead, too. If they’re dead, why are the Myrddraal still hunting them? Answer me that?”

  Mat dropped to his knees in the dust beside him. “All right. Maybe they are alive. But Thom—You saw! Blood and ashes, Rand, the same thing can happen to us.”

  Rand nodded slowly. The road behind them was still empty. He had been halfway expecting—hoping, at least—to see Thom appear, striding along, blowing out his mustaches to tell them how much trouble they were. The Queen’s Blessing in Caemlyn. He struggled to his feet and slung Thom’s bundle on his back alongside his blanketroll. Mat stared up at him, narrow-eyed and wary.

  “Let’s go,” Rand said, and started down the road toward Caemlyn. He heard Mat muttering, and after a moment he caught up to Rand.

  They trudged along the dusty road, heads down and not talking. The wind spawned dustdevils that whirled across their path. Sometimes Rand looked back, but the road behind was always empty.

  CHAPTER

  27

  Shelter From the Storm

  Perrin fretted over the days spent with the Tuatha’an, traveling south and east in a leisurely fashion. The Traveling People saw no need to hurry; they never did. The colorful wagons did not roll out of a morning until the sun was well above the horizon, and they stopped as early as mid afternoon if they came across a congenial spot. The dogs trotted easily alongside the wagons, and often the children did, too. They had no difficulty in keeping up. Any suggestion that they might go further, or more quickly, was met with laughter, or perhaps, “Ah, but would you make the poor horses work so hard?”

  He was surprised that Elyas did not share his feelings. Elyas would not ride on the wagons—he preferred to walk, sometimes loping along at the head of the column—but he never suggested leaving, or pressing on ahead.

  The strange bearded man in his strange skin clothes was so different from the gentle Tuatha’an that he stood out wherever he went among the wagons. Even from across the camp there was no mistaking Elyas for one of the People, and not just because of clothes. Elyas moved with the lazy grace of a wolf, only emphasized by his skins and his fur hat, radiating danger as naturally as a fire radiated heat, and the contrast with the Traveling People was sharp. Young and old, the People were joyful on their feet. There was no danger in their grace, only delight. Their children darted about filled with the pure zest of moving, of course, but among the Tuatha’an, graybeards and grandmothers, too, still stepped lightly, their walk a stately dance no less exuberant for its dignity. All the People seemed on the point of dancing, even when standing still, even during the rare times when there was no music in the camp. Fiddles and flutes, dulcimers and zithers and drums spun harmony and counterpoint around the wagons at almost any hour, in camp or on the move. Joyous songs, merry songs, laughing songs, sad songs; if someone was awake in the camp there was usually music.

  Elyas met friendly nods and smiles at every wagon he passed, and a cheerful word at any fire where he paused. This must be the face the People always showed to outsiders—open, smiling faces. But Perrin had learned that hidden beneath the surface was the wariness of a half-tame deer. Something deep lay behind the smiles directed at the Emond’s Fielders, something that wondered if they were safe, something that faded only slightly over the days. With Elyas the wariness was strong, like deep summer heat shimmering in the air, and it did not fade. When he was not looking they watched him openly as if unsure what he was going to do. When he walked across the camp, feet ready for dancing seemed ready for flight, as well.

  Elyas was certainly no more comfortable with their Way of the Leaf than they were with him. His mouth wore a permanent twist when he was around the Tuatha’an. It was not quite condescension and certainly not contempt, but looked as though he would rather be elsewhere than where he was, almost anywhere else. Yet whenever Perrin brought up leaving, Elyas made soothing noises about resting, just for a few days.

  “You had hard days before you met me,” Elyas said, the third or fourth time he asked, “and you’ll have harder still ahead, with Trollocs and Halfmen after you, and Aes Sedai for friends.” He grinned around a mouthful of Ila’s dried-apple pie. Perrin still found his yellow-eyed gaze disconcerting, even when he was smiling. Perhaps even more when he was smiling; smiles seldom touched those hunter’s eyes. Elyas lounged beside Raen’s fire, as usual refusing to sit on the logs drawn up for the purpose. “Don’t be in such a bloody hurry to put yourself in Aes Sedai hands.”

  “What if the Fades find us? What’s to keep them from it if we just sit here, waiting? Three wolves can’t hold them off, and the Traveling People won’t be any help. They won’t even defend themselves. The Trollocs will butcher them, and it will be our fault. Anyway, we have to leave them sooner or later. It might as well be sooner.”

  “Something tells me to wait. Just a few days.”

  “Something!”

  “Relax, lad. Take life as it comes. Run when you have to, fight when you must, rest when you can.”

  “What are you talking about, something?”

  “Have some of this pie. Ila doesn’t like me, but she surely feeds me well when I visit. Always good food in the People’s camps.”

  “What ‘something’?” Perrin demanded. “If you know something you aren’t telling the rest of us. . . .”

  Elyas frowned at the piece of pie in his hand, then set it down and dusted his hands together. “Something,” he said finally, with a shrug of his shoulders as if he did not understand it completely himself. “Something tells me it’s important to wait. A few more days. I don’t get feelings like this often, but when I do, I’ve learned to trust them. They’ve saved my life in the past. This time it’s different, somehow, but it’s important. That’s clear. You want to run on, then run on. Not me.”

  That was all he would say, no matter how many times Perrin asked. He lay about, talking with Raen, eating, napping with his hat over his eyes, and refused to discuss leaving. Something told him to wait. Something told him it was important. He would know when it was time to go. Have some pie, lad. Don’t lather yourself. Try some of this stew. Relax.

  Perrin could not make himself relax. At night he wandered among the rainbow wagons worrying, as much because no one
else seemed to see anything to worry about as for any other reason. The Tuatha’an sang and danced, cooked and ate around their campfires—fruits and nuts, berries and vegetables; they ate no meat—and went about a myriad domestic chores as if they had not a care in the world. The children ran and played everywhere, hide-and-seek among the wagons, climbing in the trees around the camp, laughing and rolling on the ground with the dogs. Not a care in the world, for anyone.

  Watching them, he itched to get away. Go, before we bring the hunters down on them. They took us in, and we repay their kindness by endangering them. At least they have reason to be lighthearted. Nothing is hunting them. But the rest of us. . . .

  It was hard to get a word with Egwene. Either she was talking with Ila, their heads together in a way that said no men were welcome, or she was dancing with Aram, swinging round and round to the flutes and fiddles and drums, to tunes the Tuatha’an had gathered from all over the world, or to the sharp, trilling songs of the Traveling People themselves, sharp whether they were quick or slow. They knew many songs, some he recognized from home, though often under different names than they were called in the Two Rivers. “Three Girls in the Meadow,” for instance, the Tinkers named “Pretty Maids Dancing,” and they said “The Wind From the North” was called “Hard Rain Falling” in some lands and “Berin’s Retreat” in others. When he asked, not thinking, for “The Tinker Has My Pots,” they fell all over themselves laughing. They knew it, but as “Toss the Feathers.”

  He could understand wanting to dance to the People’s songs. Back in Emond’s Field no one considered him more than an adequate dancer, but these songs tugged at his feet, and he thought he had never danced so long, or so hard, or so well in his life. Hypnotic, they made his blood pound in rhythm to the drums.