The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  He thought she was talking to herself, but he answered. Carefully. “If you mean about Lanfear, it wasn’t me who saved you. Moiraine did. She died saving all of us.” Laman’s sword had rid her of her only other toh to him, though he had never been able to understand what that was. The only obligation she knew. He prayed she never learned of the other; she would see it as one, though he certainly did not.

  Aviendha peered at him, head tilted and a slight smile flickering on her lips. She had regained a self-possession that would have done Sorilea proud. “Thank you, Rand al’Thor. Bair says it is well to be reminded now and then that a man does not know everything. Be sure to let me know when you mean to go to sleep. I would not come late and wake you.”

  Rand sat there staring at the door after she had gone. A Cairhienin playing the Game of Houses was usually easier to understand than any woman making no effort to be enigmatic at all. He suspected that what he felt for Aviendha, whatever that was, tangled things up worse.

  What I love, I destroy, Lews Therin laughed. What I destroy, I love.

  Shut up! Rand thought furiously, and the thin-edged laughter vanished. He did not know who he loved, but he knew who he was going to save. From whatever he could, but from him most of all.

  In the hallway, Aviendha sagged against the door, taking deep calming breaths. Meant to be calming, anyway. Her heart still tried to tear through her rib cage. Being near Rand al’Thor stretched her naked over hot coals, stretched her till she thought her bones would pop apart. He brought such shame to her as she had never thought she would know. A great joke, she had told him, and part of her did want to laugh. She had toh toward him, but much more toward Elayne. All he had done was save her life. Lanfear would have killed her without him. Lanfear had wanted to kill her in particular, as painfully as possible. Somehow, Lanfear had known. Beside what she had incurred toward Elayne, her toh toward Rand was a termite mound beside the Spine of the World.

  Cassin—the cut of his coat told her he was Goshien as well as Aethan Dor; she did not recognize his sept—merely glanced at her from where he squatted with his spears across his knees; he knew nothing, of course. But Liah smiled at her, entirely too encouragingly for a woman she did not know, entirely too knowingly for anyone. Aviendha was shocked to find herself thinking that Chareen, as Liah’s coat marked her, were often sneaking cats; she had never thought of any Maiden as anything but Far Dareis Mai. Rand al’Thor had unstrung her brain.

  Still, her fingers flashed angrily. Why do you smile, girl? Have you no better use for your time?

  Liah’s eyebrows raised slightly, and if anything her smile became amused. Her fingers moved in answer. Who do you call girl, girl? You are not yet wise, but no longer Maiden. I think you will put your soul in a wreath to lay at a man’s feet.

  Aviendha took a furious step forward—there were few insults worse among Far Dareis Mai—then stopped. In cadin’sor she did not think Liah could match her, but in skirts, she would be defeated. Worse, Liah would probably refuse to make her gai’shain; she could, attacked by a woman who was not a Maiden and not yet a Wise One, or demand the right to beat Aviendha before any of the Taardad who could be gathered. A lesser shame than the refusal, but not small. Worst of all, whether she won or lost, Melaine surely would choose a method to remind her she had left the spear behind that would make her wish Liah had drubbed her ten times before all the clans. In a Wise One’s hands, shame was keener than a flaying knife. Liah never moved a muscle; she knew all that as well as Aviendha did.

  “Now you stare at one another,” Cassin said idly. “One day I must learn this handtalk of yours.”

  Liah glanced at him, her laugh silvery. “You will look pretty in skirts, Red Shield, the day you come to ask to become a Maiden.”

  Aviendha drew a relieved breath when Liah’s eyes left hers; under the circumstances, she could not have looked away first honorably. Automatically her fingers moved in acknowledgment, the first handtalk a Maiden learned, since the phrase a new Maiden used most often. I have toh.

  Liah signed back without pause. Very small, spear-sister.

  Aviendha smiled gratefully for the missing hooked little finger that would have made the term mocking, used to women who gave up the spear and then tried to behave as if they had not.

  A wetlander servant was running up the hall. Keeping her face clear of the disgust she felt for someone who spent his life serving others, Aviendha strode off the other way, so she would not have to pass the fellow. Killing Rand al’Thor would meet one toh, killing herself the second, but each toh blocked that solution to the other. Whatever the Wise Ones said, she had to find some way to meet both.

  CHAPTER

  20

  From the Stedding

  Rand had just begun thumbing tabac into his short pipe when Liah put her head in at the door. Before she could speak, a panting round-faced man in red-and-white livery pushed past her, and fell to his knees before Rand while she stared in amazement.

  “My Lord Dragon,” the fellow burst out in a breathless squeak, “Ogier have come to the Palace. Three of them! They have been given wine, and offered more, but they insist only on seeing the Lord Dragon.”

  Rand made his voice easy; he did not want to frighten the man. “How long have you been in the Palace . . . ?” The fellow’s livery coat fit him, and he was not young. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  The kneeling man goggled. “My name? Bari, my Lord Dragon. Uh, twenty-two years, my Lord Dragon, come Winternight. My Lord Dragon, the Ogier?”

  Rand had visited an Ogier stedding twice, but he was not sure of the proper etiquette. Ogier had built most of the great cities, the oldest parts of them, and still came out of their stedding occasionally to make repairs, yet he doubted Bari would have been this excited for anyone else less than king or Aes Sedai. Maybe not for them. Rand stuffed pipe and tabac pouch back into his pocket. “Take me to them.”

  Bari leaped to his feet, all but bouncing on his toes. Rand suspected he had made the right choice; the man showed no surprise that the Lord Dragon was going to the Ogier instead of having them brought to him. He left his sword and the scepter behind; Ogier would not be impressed by either. Liah and Cassin came, of course, and it was plain Bari would have run back as well if not for the necessity of keeping his pace to Rand’s.

  The Ogier waited in a courtyard with a fountain, its basin filled with lily pads and red and gold fish, a white-haired man in a long coat that flared above high boots with their tops turned down, and two women, one noticeably much younger than the other, their skirts embroidered in vines and leaves, the elder’s considerably more elaborate that the younger’s. Golden goblets made for humans seemed tiny in their hands. Several trees retained some of their leaves, and the Palace itself gave shade. The Ogier were not alone; when Rand appeared, Sulin and a good three dozen Maidens were crowded around them, and Urien, plus fifty or more Aielmen. The Aiel had the grace to fall silent when they saw Rand.

  The Ogier man said, “Your name sings in my ears, Rand al’Thor,” in a voice like rumbling thunder and gravely made introductions. He was Haman, son of Dal son of Morel. The older woman was Covril, daughter of Ella daughter of Soong, and the younger was Erith, daughter of Iva daughter of Alar. Rand remembered seeing Erith once, in Stedding Tsofu, a hard two-day ride from the city of Cairhien. He could not imagine what she was doing in Caemlyn.

  The Ogier made the Aiel seem small; they made the courtyard seem small. Haman stood over half again as tall as Rand and broad in proportion, Covril less than a head—an Ogier head—shorter than that, and even Erith topped Rand by nearly a foot and a half. Yet that was the smallest difference between Ogier and humans. Haman’s eyes were as large and round as teacups, his broad nose nearly covered his face, and his ears stood up through his hair, tipped with white tufts. He wore long drooping white mustaches and a narrow beard beneath his chin, and his eyebrows hung down to his cheeks. Rand could not have said precisely how Covril’s and Erith’s faces differed�
�except for lacking beards and mustaches, of course, and their eyebrows were not quite so long or thick—but they seemed somehow more delicate. Though Covril’s was quite stern at the moment—she looked familiar, too, for some reason—and Erith appeared worried, her ears sagging.

  “If you will forgive me a moment,” Rand told them.

  Sulin did not let him get another word out. “We came to talk with the Treebrothers, Rand al’Thor,” she said firmly. “You must know the Aiel have long been waterfriends to the Treebrothers. We go to trade in their stedding often.”

  “That is quite true,” Haman murmured. For an Ogier, it was a murmur. An avalanche somewhere out of sight.

  “I am sure the others did come to talk,” Rand told Sulin. He could pick out the members of her guard this morning by eye, every last one of them; Jalani blushed a deep red. On the other hand, aside from Urien, no more than three or four of the morning’s Red Shields were there. “I would not like to think I need to ask Enaila and Somara to take you in charge.” Sulin’s tanned face darkened with indignation, making the scar she had taken following him stand out more. “I would talk with them alone. Alone,” he emphasized, eyeing Liah and Cassin. “Unless you think I need protection from them?” If anything that made her more offended, and she gathered up the Maidens with quick flashes of handtalk in what for anyone but an Aiel would surely have been called a huff. Some of the Aielmen were chuckling as they left; Rand supposed he had made a joke of some kind.

  As they went, Haman stroked his long beard. “Humans have not always thought us so safe, you know. Um. Um.” His musing sounded like a huge bumblebee. “It is in the old records. Very old. Only fragments, really, but dating from just after—”

  “Elder Haman,” Covril said politely, “if we may stick to the matter at hand?” This bumblebee rumbled at a higher pitch.

  Elder Haman. Where had Rand heard that before? Each stedding had its Council of Elders.

  Haman sighed deeply. “Very well, Covril, but you are showing unseemly haste. You barely gave us time to wash before coming here. I vow, you’ve begun to leap about like. . . .” Those big eyes flickered toward Rand, and he covered a cough with a hand the size of a large ham. Ogier considered humans hasty, always trying to do now what could not possibly matter until tomorrow. Or until next year; Ogier took a very long view. They also thought it insulting to remind humans of how they leaped about. “This has been a most exacting journey Outside,” Haman went on, explaining to Rand, “not the least of it discovering that the Shaido Aiel had besieged Al’cair’rahienallen—most extraordinary, that—and that you were actually there, but then you left before we could speak with you, and. . . . I cannot help feeling we have been impetuous. No. No, you speak, Covril. It is for you I left my studies, and my teaching, to go running across the world. My classes will be in riot by now.” Rand almost grinned; the way Ogier normally did things, Haman’s classes would take half a year to decide he really was gone and a year more to discuss what to do about it.

  “A mother has some right to be anxious,” Covril said, tufted ears quivering. She seemed to be battling between the respect due an Elder and a most un-Ogier-like impatience. When she turned to Rand, she drew herself up, ears standing straight and chin firm. “What have you done with my son?”

  Rand gaped. “Your son?”

  “Loial!” She stared as if he were mad. Erith was peering at him anxiously, hands clutched to her breast. “You told the Eldest of the Elders of Stedding Tsofu that you would look after him,” Covril marched on. “They told me you did. You did not call yourself Dragon then, but it was you. Wasn’t it, Erith? Did Alar not say Rand al’Thor?” She did not give the younger woman time for more than a nod. As her voice picked up speed, Haman began to look pained. “My Loial is too young to be Outside, too young to be running across the world, doing the things you no doubt have him doing. Elder Alar told me about you. What has my Loial to do with the Ways and Trollocs and the Horn of Valere? You will hand him over to me now, please, so I can see him properly married to Erith. She will settle his itchy feet.”

  “He’s very handsome,” Erith murmured shyly, her ears quivering so hard with embarrassment that the dark tufts blurred. “And I think he’s very brave, too.”

  It took Rand a moment to regain his balance mentally. An Ogier being firm sounded much the same as a mountain falling. An Ogier being firm and speaking rapidly. . . .

  By Ogier lights, Loial was too young to have left the stedding alone, little more than ninety. Ogier were very long-lived. From the first day Rand had met him, all full of eagerness to see the world, Loial had been worried over what would happen when the Elders realized he had run away. Most of all, he worried about his mother coming after him with a bride in tow. He said the man had no say in these things among Ogier, and the woman not much; it was all the two mothers’ doing. It was not beyond possibility to find yourself betrothed to a woman you had never met before the day your mother introduced you to your prospective bride and mother-in-law.

  Loial seemed to think marriage would be the end of everything for him, certainly to all his wishes to see the world, and whether it would or not, Rand could not hand a friend over to what he feared. He was about to say he did not know where Loial was and suggest they return to the stedding until he came back—he had his mouth open to say it—when a question occurred to him. It embarrassed him that he could not remember something so important; to Loial, it was. “How long has he been out of the stedding?”

  “Too long,” Haman grumbled like boulders rolling downhill. “The boy never wanted to apply himself. Always talking about seeing Outside, as if anything has really changed from what’s in the books he should have been studying. Um. Um. What real change is it if humans change the lines on a map? The land is still—”

  “He has been Outside much too long,” Loial’s mother put in as firmly as a post driven into dry clay. Haman frowned at her, and she managed to stare back at him just as firmly although her ears vibrated in embarrassment.

  “M-more than five years now,” Erith said. For a moment her ears wilted, then shot up and stubbornly back. In a very good imitation of Covril, she said, “I want him to be my husband. I knew that when I first saw him. I will not let him die. Not from being foolish.”

  Rand and Loial had talked of many things, and one of them had been the Longing, although Loial had not liked talking about it. When the Breaking of the World drove humans to flee for whatever safety they could find, it drove Ogier from the stedding too. For long years humans had wandered in a world that changed sometimes by the day, hunting that safety, and Ogier had wandered, hunting for the stedding lost in the changing land. It was then that the Longing entered them. An Ogier away from the stedding wanted to return. An Ogier long from the stedding needed to return. An Ogier too long from the stedding died.

  “He told me of an Ogier who stayed out longer,” Rand said quietly. “Ten years, I think he said.”

  Haman was shaking his massive head before Rand finished. “It will not do. That I know of, five have remained Outside that long and survived to return, and I think I would know if more had. Such madness would be written about and talked about. Three of those died within a year of coming home, the fourth was an invalid for the rest of his life, and the fifth little better, needing a stick to walk. Though she did continue writing. Um. Um. Dalar had some interesting things to say concerning—” This time when Covril opened her mouth, his head whipped around; he stared at her, long eyebrows humping up, and she began smoothing her skirts furiously. But she stared right back. “Five years is a short time, I know,” Haman told Rand, while watching Covril sharply from the corner of his eye, “but we are tied to the stedding now. We heard nothing in the city to indicate that Loial is here—and from the excitement we ourselves caused, I think we would have—but if you will tell us where he is, you will be doing him a very great kindness.”

  “The Two Rivers,” Rand said. Saving a friend’s life was not betraying him. “When I last saw him, he
was setting out in good company, with friends. It’s a quiet place, the Two Rivers. Safe.” It was now, again, thanks to Perrin. “And he was well a few months ago.” Bode had said as much when the girls were telling what had happened back home.

  “The Two Rivers,” Haman muttered. “Um. Um. Yes, I know where that is. Another long walk.” Ogier seldom rode, there being few horses that could bear them, and they preferred their own feet in any case.

  “We must start out immediately,” Erith said in a firm if light rumble. Light compared to Haman. Covril and Haman looked at her in surprise, and her ears wilted completely. She was, after all, a very young woman accompanying an Elder and a woman Rand suspected was of some importance in her own right from the way she stood up to Haman. Erith was probably not a day over eighty.

  Smiling at the thought—a slip of a girl; maybe only seventy—Rand said, “Please accept the hospitality of the Palace. A few days’ rest might even make your journey faster. And you might be able to help me, Elder Haman.” Of course; Loial was always talking about his teacher, Elder Haman. Elder Haman knew everything, according to Loial. “I need to locate the Waygates. All of them.”

  All three Ogier spoke at once.

  “Waygates?” Haman said, ears and eyebrows both shooting up. “The Ways are very dangerous. Far too dangerous.”