The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  She should go facedown on the floor, grovel for her life, but she could not move. She could not look away from that eyeless stare. “No, Great Lord,” she managed with a mouth as dry as dust. She knew. It could not be, but she knew. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, she realized.

  The Myrddraal smiled again. “Many have fallen from great heights for wanting to know too much.”

  It flowed toward her—no; not it—the Great Lord, clothed in the skin of a Myrddraal, flowed toward her. He walked on legs, yet there was no other description for the way he moved. The pale, black-clad shape bent toward her, and she would have shrieked when he touched a finger to her forehead. She would have shrieked if she could have summoned any sound at all. Her lungs were airless sacks. The touch burned like red-hot iron. Vaguely, she wondered why she did not smell her own flesh burning. The Great Lord straightened, and the searing pain dwindled, vanished. Her terror did not lessen in the slightest, though.

  “You are marked as mine,” the Great Lord rasped. “Mesaana will not harm you, now. Unless I give her permission. You will find who threatens my creatures here and deliver them to me.” He turned away from her, and the dark armor fell from his body. She was startled when it hit the carpeted floor tiles with a crash of steel rather than simply vanishing. He was clothed in black, and she could not have said whether it was silk or leather or something else. The darkness of it seemed to drink the light from the room. Mesaana began to thrash in her bonds, keening shrilly past the gag in her mouth. “Go now,” he said, “if you wish to live another hour.” The sound coming from Mesaana rose to a despairing scream.

  Alviarin did not know how she got out of her rooms—she could not understand how she was upright when her legs felt like water—but she found herself running through the corridors, skirts pulled to her knees and running as hard as she could. Suddenly the head of a wide staircase loomed in front of her, and she barely managed to stop from running right out into the air. Sagging against the wall, shaking, she stared down the curving flight of white marble steps. In her mind, she could see her body breaking as it crashed down the stairway.

  Breathing raggedly, in hoarse, raw-throated pants, she put a trembling hand to her forehead. Her thoughts tumbled one over another, as she would have down the stairs. The Great Lord had marked her as his. Her fingers slid across smooth unblemished skin. She had always prized knowledge—power grew from knowledge—but she did not want to know what was happening in the rooms she had left. She wished she did not know that anything was happening. The Great Lord had marked her, but Mesaana would find a way to kill her, for knowing that. The Great Lord had marked her and given her a command. She could live, if she found who was hunting the Black Ajah. Straightening her back with an effort, she hurriedly scrubbed at the tears on her cheeks with the heels of her palms. She could not pull her eyes away from the stairs falling away in front of her. Elaida surely suspected her, but if there was no more to it than that, she could always manufacture a hunt. It just had to include Elaida herself as a threat to be extinguished. Delivered to the Great Lord. Her fingers fluttered to her forehead again. She had the Black Ajah at her command. Smooth, unblemished skin. Talene had been there, in Elaida’s rooms. Why had she looked at Yukiri and Doesine that way? Talene was Black, though she did not know that Alviarin was, of course. Would any mark show in a mirror? Was there something that others could see? If she had to manufacture a scheme for Elaida’s supposed hunters, Talene might be a place to start. She tried to trace the route any message would have taken from heart to heart before it reached Talene, but she could not stop staring down the stairs, seeing her body bounce and break its way to the bottom. The Great Lord had marked her.

  CHAPTER

  22

  One Answer

  Pevara waited with a touch of impatience while the slim little Accepted placed the rimmed silver tray on a side table and uncovered the dish of cakes. A short woman with a serious face, Pedra was not being laggard, or resentful over having to spend the morning fetching and carrying for a Sitter, just precise and careful. Those were useful qualities, to be encouraged. Still, when the accepted asked whether she should pour the wine, Pevara said crisply, “We will do for ourselves, child. You may wait in the anteroom.” She almost told the young woman to go back to her studies.

  Pedra spread her banded white skirts in a graceful curtsy without any sign of being flustered the way Accepted often were when a Sitter showed snappishness. All too frequently, Accepted took any bite in a Sitter’s tone as an opinion on their fitness for the shawl, as if Sitters had no other concerns.

  Pevara waited until the door closed behind Pedra and the latch clicked before nodding approvingly. “That one will be raised Aes Sedai soon,” she said. It was satisfying when any woman attained the shawl, but especially when the woman had appeared unpromising to begin with. Small pleasures seemed the only ones available, these days.

  “Not one of ours, though, I think” was the reply from her surprising guest, who turned from a study of the row of painted miniatures of Pevara’s dead family that stood in a line on the wave-carved marble mantel above the fireplace. “She’s uncertain about men. I believe they make her nervous.”

  Tarna certainly had never been nervous about men or very much of anything else, at least not since she reached the shawl just over twenty years ago. Pevara could remember a very jumpy novice, but the pale-haired woman’s blue eyes were steady as stones, now. And about as warm as stones in winter. Even so, there was something in that cool prideful face, something in the set of her mouth, that made her seem uneasy this morning. Pevara could hardly imagine what might make Tarna Feir nervous.

  The real question, though, was why the woman had come to see her. It bordered on impropriety for her to visit any Sitter privately, particularly a Red. Tarna still maintained her rooms here in the Red quarter, but so long as she held her new position, she was no longer part of the Red Ajah despite the crimson embroidery on her dark gray dress. Delaying the move to her new apartment might be taken as a show of delicacy, by those who did not know her.

  Anything out of the ordinary made Pevara wary since Seaine had pulled her into hunting the Black Ajah. And Elaida trusted Tarna, just as she had trusted Galina; it was wise to be very cautious with anyone Elaida trusted. Just thinking of Galina—the Light burn the woman forever!—still set Pevara’s teeth on edge, but there was a second connection. Galina had taken a special interest in Tarna as a novice, too. True, Galina had taken an interest in any novice or Accepted she thought might join the Red, but it was another reason for caution.

  Not that Pavara let anything show on her face, of course. She had been Aes Sedai too long for that. Smiling, she reached for the long-necked silver pitcher that sat on the tray giving off the sweet scent of spices. “Will you take wine, Tarna, in congratulation for being raised?”

  Silver goblets in hand, they settled on spiral-worked armchairs, a style that had gone out of fashion in Kandor near a hundred years ago, but one that Pevara liked. She saw no reason to change her furniture or anything else according to the whims of the moment. The chairs had served her since they were new-made, and they were comfortable with the addition of a few cushions. Tarna sat stiffly, however, on the edge of her seat. No one had ever called her languid, but clearly she was uneasy.

  “I am not certain congratulations are in order,” she said, fingering the narrow red stole draped around her neck. The exact shade was not prescribed, except that anyone who saw it must call the color red, and she had chosen a brilliant scarlet that nearly shone. “Elaida insisted, and I could not refuse. Much has changed since I left the Tower, inside as well as out. Alviarin made everyone . . . watchful . . . of the Keeper. I suspect some will want her birched, when she finally returns. And Elaida . . .” She paused to sip at her wine, but when she lowered the goblet, she went on in a different vein. “I have often heard you called unconventional. I have even heard that you once said you would like to have a Warder.”

  “I’ve been called
worse than unconventional,” Pevara said dryly. What had the woman been about to say concerning Elaida? She sounded as though she would have refused the Keeper’s stole, given her wishes. Strange. Tarna was hardly shy or shrinking. Silence seemed best. Especially about Warders. She had been talking too much if that was general gossip. Besides, keep silent long enough, and the other woman always spoke if only to fill up the gap. You could learn a great deal through silence. She sipped her own wine slowly. There was too much honey in it for her taste, and not enough ginger.

  Still stiff, Tarna rose and strode to the fireplace, where she stood staring at the miniatures sitting on their white lacquered stands. She raised a hand to touch one of the ivory ovals, and Pevara felt her own shoulders tighten in spite of herself. Georg, her youngest brother, had been only twelve when he died, when all of the people in those paintings died, in an uprising by Darkfriends. They had not been a family who could afford ivory miniatures, but once she had the coin, she found a painter who could capture her memories. A beautiful boy, Georg, tall for his years and utterly fearless. Long after the event, she had learned how her baby brother died. With a knife in his hand, standing over their father’s body and trying to keep the mob from their mother. So many years ago, now. They would all have been long dead in any case, and their children’s children’s children, as well. But some hatreds never died.

  “The Dragon Reborn is ta’veren, so I have heard,” Tarna said finally, still staring at Georg’s picture. “Do you think he alters chance everywhere? Or do we change the future by ourselves, one step following another until we find ourselves somewhere we never expected?”

  “What do you mean?” Pevara said, a trifle more curtly than she could have wished. She did not like the other woman peering at her brother’s image so intently while talking of a man who could channel, even if he was the Dragon Reborn. She bit her lip so as not to tell Tarna to turn around and look at her. You could not read someone’s back the way you could a face.

  “I anticipated no great difficulty in Salidar. No great success, either, but what I found . . .” Was that a shake of her head, or had she merely changed the angle at which she was peering at the miniature? She spoke slowly, but with an undercurrent of remembered urgency. “I left a pigeon-handler a day outside the village, yet it took me less than half a day to get back to her, and after I loosed the birds with copies of my report, I pressed on so hard I had to pay the woman off because she could not keep up. I can hardly say how many horses I went through. Sometimes, the animal was spent to the point I had to show my ring to make a stable take it in trade, even with silver added. And because I pressed so hard, I happened to reach a village in Murandy while a . . . recruiting party . . . was there. If I had not been frightened out of my wits for the Tower by what I saw in Salidar, I would have ridden to Ebou Dar and taken ship for Illian and then upriver, but the thought of going south instead of north, the thought of waiting for a vessel, sent me like an arrow toward Tar Valon. So I was in that village to see them.”

  “Who, Tarna?”

  “Asha’man.” The woman did turn then. Her eyes were still blue ice, but tight. She held her goblet in both hands as if trying to soak in the warmth. “I did not know what they were then, of course, but they were openly recruiting men to follow the Dragon Reborn, and it seemed wisest to listen before I spoke. Well for me that I did. There were six of them, Pevara, six men in black coats. Two with silver swords on their collars were feeling men out about whether they might like to learn to channel. Oh, they did not say so right out. Wield the lightnings, they called it. Wield the lightnings and ride the thunder. But it was clear enough to me, if not to the fools they were talking to.”

  “Yes; very well for you that you kept silent,” Pevara said quietly. “Six men who can channel would be more than merely dangerous for a sister by herself. Our eyes-and-ears are full of talk about these recruiting parties—they appear everywhere from Saldaea to Tear—but no one seems to have an idea of how to stop them. If it isn’t too late for that already.” She very nearly bit her lip again. That was the trouble with talking. Sometimes, you said more than you wanted.

  Oddly, the comment took some of the stiffness out of Tarna. She resumed her seat, leaning back, though a hint of wariness still clung to the way she held herself. She chose her words carefully, pausing to touch the wine to her lips, but she did not actually drink, that Pevara saw. “I had a long time to think on the rivership coming north. Longer, after the fool captain ran us aground so hard he broke a mast and put a hole in the hull. Days trying to hail another ship, after we got ashore, and days finding a horse. Six of those men sent to one village convinced me, finally. Oh, the district around, as well, but it was not very populous. I . . . I believe it is too late.”

  “Elaida thinks they can all be gentled,” Pevara said noncommittally. She had already exposed herself too much.

  “When they can send six to one small village, and Travel? There is only one answer I can see. We . . .” Tarna took a deep breath, fingering the bright red stole again, but now it seemed more in regret than to play for time. “Red sisters must take them as Warders, Pevara.”

  That was so startling that Pevara blinked. A hair less self-control, and she would have gaped. “Are you serious?”

  Those icy blue eyes met her gaze steadily. The worst was past—the unthinkable spoken aloud— and Tarna was a woman of stone once more. “This is hardly a matter for joking. The only other choice is to let them run loose. Who else can do it? Red sisters are used to facing men like this, and ready to take the necessary risks. Anyone else will flinch. Each sister will have to take more than one, but Greens appear to manage well enough with that. I think the Greens will faint if this is suggested to them, though. We . . . Red sisters . . . must do what needs to be done.”

  “Have you broached this to Elaida?” Pevara asked, and Tarna shook her head impatiently.

  “Elaida believes as you said. She . . .” The yellow-haired woman frowned into her wine before going on. “Elaida often believes what she wants to believe and sees what she wants to see. I tried to bring up the Asha’man the first day I was back. Not to suggest bonding; not to her. I am not a fool. She forbade me to mention them to her. But you are . . . unconventional.”

  “And do you believe they can be gentled after they’re bonded? I have no idea what that would do to the sister holding the bond, and in truth, I don’t want to learn.” She was the one playing for time, Pevara realized. She had had no idea where this interview was headed when it began, but she would have wagered everything she owned against it coming to this.

  “That might be the end, and it might prove impossible,” the other woman replied coolly. The woman was stone. “Either way, I can see no other way to handle these Asha’man. Red sisters must bond them as Warders. If there is any way, I will be among the first, but it must be done.”

  She sat there, calmly sipping her wine, and for a long time, Pevara could only stare at her in consternation. Nothing Tarna had said proved she was not Black Ajah, yet she could not distrust every sister unable to prove that. Well, she could and did, when it came to matters of the Black, but there were other matters she had to deal with. She was a Sitter, not simply a hunting dog. She had the White Tower to think of, and Aes Sedai far from the Tower. And the future.

  Dipping her fingers into her embroidered belt pouch, she drew out a small piece of paper rolled into a thin tube. It seemed to her that it should glow with letters of fire. So far, she was one of two women in the Tower who knew what was written there. Even once she had it out, she hesitated before handing it to Tarna. “This came from one of our agents in Cairhien, but it was sent by Toveine Gazal.”

  Tarna’s eyes jerked to Pevara’s face at the mention of Toveine’s name, then fell to reading again. Her stony face did not change even after she finished and let the paper roll back into a tube in her hand. “This changes nothing,” she said flatly. Coldly. “It only makes what I suggest more urgent.”

  “On the cont
rary,” Pevara sighed. “That changes everything. It changes the whole world.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  Ornaments

  The air in the room was just sufficiently warmer than outside to put a mist on the glass panes set in the red-painted casements, and the glass contained bubbles besides, but Cadsuane stood peering out as if she could see the dreary landscape clearly. She could see with more than enough clarity, in any case. A few hapless folk, bundled and hatted and only shapeless skirts or baggy breeches distinguishing men from women, were trudging the muddy fields that surrounded the manor house, sometimes stooping to feel a handful of the soil. It would not be long before they could begin their plowing and manuring, but only their inspection indicated the coming of spring any time soon. Beyond the fields, the forest was all dark bare branches against a washed-out gray morning sky. A good coating of snow would have made the view much less bleak, but it snowed lightly and seldom here, with traces of one fall rarely lasting until the next. Still, she could think of few places better for her purposes, with the Spine of the World little more than a day’s hard ride to the east. Who would think to look inside the borders of Tear? Had convincing the boy to stay here been too easy, though? With a sigh, she turned from the window, feeling the golden ornaments hanging in her hair sway, the small moons and stars, birds and fish. She was very aware of them, of late. Aware? Phaw! Of late, she had considered sleeping with them in place.

  The sitting room was large but not ornate, like the manor house itself, with cornices of carved wood, painted red. The furniture was bright with paint but not a touch of gilding, the two long fireplaces plain stone if well made, the andirons sturdy wrought metal made for long service rather than appearances. The fires on the hearths were small, at her insistence, the flames flickering low on half-consumed splits, but either was enough to warm her hands, which was all she wanted. Left to his own devices, Algarin would have surrounded her with blazing warmth and smothered her in servants, few as he still employed. A lesser Lord of the Land, he was far from wealthy, yet he paid his debts in letter and spirit, even when most other men would have seen quite the reverse of a debt.