A Crown of Swords

## Chapter 36

#### Blades

Min did not know whether to groan or shout or sit down and cry. Caraline, staring wide-eyed at Rand, seemed in the same quandary.

With a laugh, Toram began rubbing his hands together. “Listen, everyone,” he shouted. “You are going to see some sport. Clear a space. Clear a space.” He strode off, waving people away from the center of the tent.

“Sheepherder,” Min growled, “you’re not wool-brained. You don’t have any brains!”

“I would not put it quite so,” Caraline said in a very dry voice, “but I suggest you leave, now. Whatever . . . tricks . . . you think you might use, there are seven Aes Sedai in this tent, four of them Red Ajah lately arrived from the south on their way to Tar Valon. Should one of them so much as suspect, I very much fear that whatever might have come of today, never will. Leave.”

“I won’t use any . . . tricks.” Rand unbuckled his sword belt and handed it to Min. “If I’ve touched you and Darlin in one way, maybe I can touch Toram in another.” The crowd was pushing back, opening up an area twenty paces across between two of the great centerpoles. Some looked to Rand, and there was a great deal of rib nudging and sly laughter. The Aes Sedai were offered pride of place, of course, Cadsuane and her two friends on one side, four ageless women in Red Ajah shawls on the other. Cadsuane and her companions were eyeing Rand with open disapproval and as close to irritation as any Aes Sedai ever let show, but the Red sisters looked more concerned with those three. At least, although they stood directly opposite, they managed to seem oblivious of the presence of any other sisters. No one could be that blind without trying.

“Listen to me, cousin.” Caraline’s low voice almost crackled with urgency. She stood very close, her neck craned to look up at him. Barely reaching his chest, she seemed ready to box his ears. “If you use none of your special tricks,” Caraline went on, “he can hurt you badly, even with practice swords, and he will. He has never liked another touching what he thinks is his, and he suspects every pretty young man who speaks to me of being my lover. When we were children, he pushed a friend—a friend!—down the stairs and broke his back because Derowin rode his pony without asking. Go, cousin. No one will think less; no one expects a boy to face a blademaster. Jaisi . . . whatever your real name is . . . help me convince him!”

Min opened her mouth—and Rand laid a finger across her lips. “I am who I am,” he smiled. “And I don’t think I could run from him if I wasn’t. So, he’s a blademaster.” Unbuttoning his coat, he strode out into the cleared area.

“Why must they be so stubborn when you least wish it?” Caraline whispered in tones of frustration. Min could only nod in agreement.

Toram had stripped to shirt and breeches, and carried two practice swords, their “blades” bundles of thin lathes tied together. He raised an eyebrow at the sight of Rand with his coat simply hanging open. “You will be confined in that, cousin.” Rand shrugged.

Without warning, Toram tossed one of the swords; Rand caught it out of the air by the long hilt.

“Those gloves will slip, cousin. You want a firm grip.”

Rand took the hilt in both hands and turned slightly sideways, blade down and left foot forward.

Toram spread his hands as if to say he had done all he could. “Well, at least he knows how to stand,” he laughed, and on the last word darted forward, practice sword streaking for Rand’s head with all his might behind it.

With a loud clack, bundled lathes met bundled lathes. Rand had moved nothing except his sword. For a moment, Toram stared at him, and Rand looked back calmly. Then they began to dance.

That was all Min could call it, that gliding, flowing movement, wooden blades flickering and spinning. She had watched Rand practice the sword against the best he could find, often against two or three or four at once, but that had been nothing to this. So beautiful, and so easy to forget that had those lathes been steel, blood could have flowed. Except that no blade, steel or lathes, touched flesh. Back and forth they danced, circling one another, swords now probing, now slashing, Rand attacking, now defending, and every movement punctuated by those loud clacks.

Caraline gripped Min’s arm hard without taking her eyes from the contest. “He is also a blademaster,” she breathed. “He must be. Look at him!”

Min was looking, and hugging Rand’s sword belt and scabbarded blade as if they were him. Back and forth in beauty, and whatever Rand thought, Toram clearly wished his blade was steel. Cold rage burned on his face, and he pressed harder, harder. Still no blade touched anything but another, yet now Rand backed away constantly, sword darting to defend, and Toram moved forward, attacking, eyes glittering with icy fury.

Outside, someone screamed, a wail of utter horror, and suddenly the huge tent snapped up into the air, vanishing into a thick grayness that hid the sky. Fog billowed on every side, filled with distant shrieks and bellows. Thin tendrils wafted into the clear inverted bowl left by the tent. Everyone stared in amazement. Almost everyone.

Toram’s lathe blade smashed into Rand’s side with a bone-crack sound, doubling him over. “You are dead, cousin,” Toram sneered, lifting his sword high to strike again—and froze, staring, as part of the heavy gray mist overhead . . . solidified. A tentacle of fog, it might have been a thick three-toed arm, reaching down, closed around the stout Red sister, snatching her into the air before anyone had a chance to move.

Cadsuane was the first to overcome shock. Her arms rose, shaking back her shawl, her hands made a twist, and a ball of fire seemed to shoot upward from each palm, streaking into the mist. Above, something suddenly burst into flame, one violent gout that vanished immediately, and the Red sister fell back into sight, dropping with a thud facedown on the carpets near where Rand knelt on one knee clutching his side. At least, she would have been facedown had her head not been twisted around so her dead eyes stared up into the fog.

Whatever scraps of composure remained in the tent fled with that. The Shadow had been given flesh. Screaming people fled in every direction, knocking over tables, nobles clawing past servants and servants past nobles. Buffeted, Min fought her way to Rand with fists and elbows and his sword as a club.

“Are you all right?” she asked, pulling him to his feet. She was surprised to see Caraline on the other side, helping him, too. For that matter, Caraline looked surprised.

He took his hand from beneath his coat, fingers thankfully free of blood. That half-healed scar, so tender, had not broken open. “I think we best move,” he said, taking his sword belt. “We have to get out of this.” The inverted bowl of clear air was noticeably smaller. Almost everyone else had fled. Out in the fog, screams rose, most cutting off abruptly but always replaced by new.

“I agree, Tomas,” Darlin said. Sword in hand, he planted himself with his back to Caraline, between her and the fog. “The question is, in which direction? And also, how far do we have to go?”

“This is his work,” Toram spat. “Al’Thor’s.” Hurling down his practice sword, he stalked to his discarded coat and calmly donned it. Whatever else he was, he was no coward. “Jeraal?” he shouted at the fog as he fastened his sword belt. “Jeraal, the Light burn you, man, where are you? Jeraal!” Mordeth—Fain—did not answer, and he went on shouting.

The only others still there were Cadsuane and her two companions, faces calm but hands running nervously over their shawls. Cadsuane herself might have been setting out for a stroll. “I should think north,” she said. “The slope lies closer that way, and climbing may take us above this. Stop that caterwauling, Toram! Either your man’s dead, or he can’t hear.” Toram glared at her, but he did stop shouting. Cadsuane did not appear to notice or care, so long as he was silent. “North, then. We three will take care of anything your steel can’t handle.” She looked straight at Rand when she said that, and he gave a whisker of a nod before buckling his sword belt and drawing his blade. Trying not to goggle, Min exchanged glances with Caraline; the other woman’s eyes looked as large as teacups. The Aes Sedai knew who he was, and she was going to keep anyone else from knowing.

“I wish we had not left our Warders back in the city,” the slim Yellow sister said. Tiny silver bells in her dark hair chimed as she tossed her head. She had almost as commanding an air as Cadsuane, enough that you did not realize how pretty she was at first, except that that toss of her head seemed . . . well . . . a touch petulant. “I wish I had Roshan here.”

“A circle, Cadsuane?” the Gray asked. Head turning this way and that to peer at the fog, she looked like a plump, pale-haired sparrow with her sharp nose and inquisitive eyes. Not a frightened sparrow, but one definitely ready to take wing. “Should we link?”

“No, Niande,” Cadsuane sighed. “If you see something, you must be able to strike at it without waiting to point it out for me. Samitsu, stop worrying about Roshan. We have three fine swords here, two of them heron-mark, I see. They will do.”

Toram showed his teeth on seeing the heron engraved on the blade Rand had unsheathed. If it was a smile, it held no mirth. His own bared blade bore a heron, too. Darlin’s did not, but he gave Rand and his sword a weighing look, then a respectful nod that was considerably deeper than he had offered plain Tomas Trakand, of a minor branch of the House.

The gray-haired Green had taken charge, clearly, and she kept it despite attempted protests from Darlin, who like many Tairens seemed not to relish Aes Sedai a great deal, and Toram, who just seemed to dislike anyone giving orders but himself. For that matter, so did Caraline, but Cadsuane ignored her frowns as completely as she did the men’s voiced complaints. Unlike them, Caraline appeared to realize complaints would do no good. Wonder of wonders, Rand meekly let himself be placed to Cadsuane’s right as she quickly arranged everyone. Well, not exactly meekly—he stared down his nose at her in a way that would have made Min slap him if he did it to her; Cadsuane just shook her head and muttered something that reddened his face—but at least he kept his mouth shut. Right then, Min almost thought he would announce who he was. And maybe expect the fog to vanish in fear of the Dragon Reborn. He smiled at her as though fog in this weather was nothing, even a fog that snatched tents and people.

They moved into the thick mist in a formation like a six-pointed star, Cadsuane herself in the lead, an Aes Sedai at each of two other points, a man with a sword at three. Toram, of course, protested loudly at bringing up the rear until Cadsuane mentioned the honor of the rear guard or some such. That quieted him down. Min had no objection whatsoever to her own position with Caraline in the center of the star. She carried a knife in either hand, and wondered whether they would be any use. It was something of a relief to see the dagger in Caraline’s fist tremble. At least her own hands were steady. Then again, she thought she might be too frightened to shake.

The fog was cold as winter. Grayness closed around them in swirls, so heavy it was difficult to see the others clearly. Hearing was all too easy, though. Shrieks drifted through the murk, men and women crying out, horses screaming. The fog seemed to deaden sound, make it hollow, so that, thankfully, those awful sounds seemed distant. The mist ahead began to thicken, but fireballs immediately shot from Cadsuane’s hands, sizzling through the icy gray, and the thickening erupted in one roaring flare of flame. Roars behind, light flashing against the fog like lightning against clouds, spoke of the other two sisters at work. Min had no desire to look back. What she could see was more than enough.

Past trampled tents half obscured by gray haze they moved, past bodies and sometimes parts of bodies not nearly obscured enough. A leg. An arm. A man who was not there from the waist down. Once a woman’s head that seemed to grin from where it sat on the corner of an overturned wagon. The land began to slope upward, steeper. Min saw her first living soul besides them, and wished she had not. A man wearing one of the red coats staggered toward them, waving his left arm feebly. The other was gone, and wet white bone showed where half his face had been. Something that might have been words bubbled though his teeth; and he collapsed. Samitsu knelt briefly beside him, putting her fingers against the bloody ruin of his forehead. Rising, she shook her head, and they moved on. Upslope, and up, until Min began wondering whether they were climbing a mountain instead of a hill.

Right in front of Darlin, the fog suddenly began to take on form, a man-high shape, but all tentacles and gaping mouths full of sharp teeth. The High Lord might have been no blademaster, but he was not slow either. His blade sliced through the middle of the still-coalescing shape, looped and slashed it top to bottom. Four clouds of fog, thicker than the surrounding mist, settled to the ground. “Well,” he said, “at least we know steel can cut these . . . creatures.”

The thicker chunks of fog oozed together, began to rise once more.

Cadsuane stretched out a hand, droplets of fire falling from her fingertips; one bright flash of flame seared the solidifying fog from existence. “But no more than cut, so it seems,” she murmured.

Ahead to their right, a woman suddenly appeared in the swirling gray, silk skirts held high as she half ran, half fell down the slope toward them. “Thank the Light!” she screamed. “Thank the Light! I thought I was alone!” Right behind her the fog drew together, a nightmare all teeth and claws, looming above her. Had it been a man, Min was sure Rand would have waited.

His hand rose before Cadsuane could move, and a bar of . . . something . . . liquid white fire brighter than the sun . . . shot out over the running woman’s head. The creature simply vanished. For a moment there was clear air where it had been, and along the line that the bar had burned, until the fog began closing in. A moment while the woman froze where she stood. Then, shrieking at the top of her lungs, she turned and ran from them, still downslope, fleeing what she feared more than nightmares in these mists.

“You!” Toram roared, so loudly that Min spun to face him with her knives raised. He stood pointing his sword at Rand. “You are him! I was right! This is your work! You will not trap me, al’Thor!” Suddenly he broke away at an angle, scrambling wildly up the slope. “You will not trap me!”

“Come back!” Darlin shouted after him. “We must stick together! We must . . . ” He trailed off, staring at Rand. “You are him. The Light burn me, you are!” He half-moved as if to place himself between Rand and Caraline, but at least he did not run.

Calmly, Cadsuane picked her way across the slope to Rand. And slapped his face so hard his head jerked. Min’s breath caught in shock. “You will not do that again,” Cadsuane said. There was no heat in her voice, just iron. “Do you hear me? Not balefire. Not ever.”

Surprisingly, Rand only rubbed his cheek. “You were wrong, Cadsuane. He’s real. I’m certain of it. I know he is.” Even more surprisingly, he sounded as if he very much wanted her to believe.

Min’s heart went out to him. He had mentioned hearing voices; he must mean that. She raised her right hand toward him, forgetting for the moment that it held a knife, and opened her mouth to say something comforting. Though she was not entirely sure she would ever be able to use that particular word innocuously again. She opened her mouth—and Padan Fain seemed to leap out of the mists behind Rand, steel gleaming in his fist.

“Behind you!” Min screamed, pointing with the knife in her outstretched right hand as she threw the one in her left. Everything seemed to happen at once, half-seen in wintery fog.

Rand began to turn; twisting aside, and Fain also twisted, to lunge for him. For that twist, her knife missed, but Fain’s dagger scored along Rand’s left side. It hardly seemed to more than slice his coat, yet he screamed. He screamed, a sound to make Min’s heart clench, and clutching his side, he fell against Cadsuane, catching at her to hold himself up, pulling both of them down.

“Move out of my way!” one of the other sisters shouted—Samitsu, Min thought—and suddenly, Min’s feet jerked out from under her. She landed heavily, grunting as she hit the slope together with Caraline, who snapped a breathless, “Blood and fire!”

Everything at once.

“Move!” Samitsu shouted again, as Darlin lunged for Fain with his sword. The bony man moved with shocking speed, throwing himself down and rolling beyond Darlin’s reach. Strangely, he cackled with laughter as he scampered to his feet and ran off, swallowed in the murk almost immediately.

Min pushed herself up shaking.

Caraline was much more vigorous. “I will tell you now, Aes Sedai,” she said in a cold voice, brushing at her skirts violently, “I will not be treated so. I am Caraline Damodred, High Seat of House . . . ”

Min stopped listening. Cadsuane was sitting on the slope above, holding Rand’s head in her lap. It had only been a cut. Fain’s dagger could not have more than touched . . . With a cry, Min threw herself forward. Aes Sedai or no, she pushed the woman away from Rand and cradled his head in her arms. His eyes were closed, his breathing ragged. His face felt hot.

“Help him!” she screamed at Cadsuane, like an echo of the distant screams in the mist. “Help him!” A part of her said that did not make much sense after pushing her away, but his face seemed to burn her hands, to burn sense.

“Samitsu, quickly,” Cadsuane said, standing and rearranging her shawl. “He’s beyond my Talent for Healing.” She laid a hand on the top of Min’s head. “Girl, I will hardly let the boy die when I haven’t taught him manners yet. Stop crying, now.”

It was very strange. Min was fairly sure the woman had done nothing to her with the Power, yet she believed. Teach him manners? A fine tussle that would be. Unfolding her arms from around his head, not without reluctance, Min backed away on her knees. Very strange. She had not even realized that she was crying, yet Cadsuane’s reassurance was enough to stop the flow of tears. Sniffing, she scrubbed at her cheeks with the heel of her hand as Samitsu knelt beside him, placing fingertips on his forehead. Min wondered why she did not take his head in both hands, the way Moiraine did.

Abruptly Rand convulsed, gasping and thrashing so hard that a flailing arm knocked the Yellow over on her back. As soon as her fingers left him, he subsided. Min crawled nearer. He breathed more easily, but his eyes were still closed. She touched his cheek. Cooler than it had been, but still too warm. And pale.

“Something is amiss,” Samitsu said peevishly as she sat up. Pulling Rand’s coat aside, she gripped the slice in his bloodstained shirt and ripped a wide gap in the linen.

The cut from Fain’s dagger, no longer than her hand and not deep, ran right across the old round scar. Even in the dim light, Min could see that the edges of the gash looked swollen and angry, as if the wound had gone untended for days. It was no longer bleeding, but it should have been gone. That was what Healing did: wounds knitted themselves up right before your eyes.

“This,” Samitsu said in a lecturing tone, lightly touching the scar, “seems like a cyst, but full of evil instead of pus. And this . . . ” She drew the finger down the gash. “ . . . seems full of a different evil.” Suddenly she frowned at the Green standing over her, and her voice became sullen and defensive. “If I had the words, Cadsuane, I would use them. I have never seen the like. Never. But I will tell you this. I think if I had been one moment slower, perhaps if you had not tried first, he would be dead now. As it is . . . ” With a sigh, the Yellow sister seemed to deflate, her face sagging. “As it is, I believe he will die.”

Min shook her head, trying to say no, but she could not seem to make her tongue move. She heard Caraline murmuring a prayer. The woman stood gripping one of Darlin’s coatsleeves with both hands. Darlin himself frowned down at Rand as though trying to make sense of what he saw.

Cadsuane bent to pat Samitsu’s shoulder. “You are the best living, perhaps the best ever,” she said quietly. “No one has the Healing to compare with you.” With a nod, Samitsu stood, and before she was on her feet, she was all Aes Sedai serenity once more. Cadsuane, scowling down at Rand with her hands on her hips, was not. “Phaw! I will not allow you to die on me, boy,” she growled, sounding as though it were his fault. This time, instead of touching the top of Min’s head, she rapped it with a knuckle. “Get to your feet, girl. You’re no milksop—any fool can see that—so stop pretending. Darlin, you will carry him. Bandages must wait. This fog is not leaving us, so we had better leave it.”

Darlin hesitated. Maybe it was Cadsuane’s peremptory frown, and maybe the hand Caraline half-raised to his face, but abruptly he sheathed his sword, muttering under his breath, and hoisted Rand across his shoulders with arms and legs dangling.

Min took up the heron-mark blade and carefully slid it into the scabbard hanging from Rand’s waist. “He will need it,” she told Darlin, and after a moment, he nodded. A lucky thing for him he did; she had bundled all her confidence into the Green sister, and she was not about to let anyone think differently.

“Now be careful, Darlin,” Caraline said in that throaty voice once Cadsuane made their marching order clear. “Be sure to stay behind me, and I will protect you.”

Darlin laughed till he wheezed, and was still chuckling when they began climbing through the cold fog and the distant shrieks once more, with him carrying Rand in the center and the women in a circle around him.

Min knew she was only another pair of eyes, just like Caraline on the other side of Cadsuane, and she knew the knife she carried unsheathed was no use against the mist-shapes, but Padan Fain might still be alive out there. She would not miss again. Caraline carried her dagger too, and by the looks she cast over her shoulder at Darlin staggering uphill under Rand’s weight, maybe she also intended to protect the Dragon Reborn. And then again, maybe it was not him. A woman could forgive any amount of nose for that laugh.

Shapes still formed in the mist and died by fire, and once a huge something tore a shrieking horse in two off to their right before any Aes Sedai could slay it. Min was quite noisily sick after that, and not a bit ashamed; people were dying, but at least the people had come here by their own choice. The meanest soldier could have run away yesterday had he chosen, but not that horse. Shapes formed and died, and people died, screaming always in the distance, it seemed, though they still stumbled past torn carrion that had been human an hour gone. Min began to wonder whether they would ever see daylight again.

With shocking suddenness and no warning, she stumbled into it, one moment surrounded by gray, the next with the sun burning golden high overhead in a blue sky, all so bright she had to shade her eyes. And there, perhaps five miles across all but treeless hills, Cairhien rose solid and square on its own prominences. Somehow, it did not look quite real anymore.

Staring back at the edge of the fog, she shivered. It was an edge, a billowing wall, stretching though the trees on this hilltop, and far too straight, with no eddies or thinning. Just clear air here, and there, thick gray. A little more of a tree right in front of her became visible, and she realized the mist was creeping back, perhaps being burned off by the sun. But far too slowly to make the retreat natural. The others stared at it just as hard as she, even the Aes Sedai.

Twenty paces off to their left, a man suddenly scrambled into the clear air on all fours. The front of his head was shaved, and by the battered black breastplate he wore, he was a common soldier. Staring about wildly, he did not appear to see them, and went scrambling on down the hillside, still on hands and knees. Farther to the right, two men and a woman appeared, all running. She had stripes of color across the front of her dress, but how many was hard to say since she had gathered her skirts as high as she could to run faster, and she matched the men stride for stride. None of them looked to either side, only launched themselves down the hill, falling, tumbling and coming back to their feet running again.

Caraline studied the slim blade of her dagger for a moment, then thrust it hard into it sheath. “So vanishes my army,” she sighed.

Darlin, with Rand still unconscious across his shoulders, looked at her. “There is an army in Tear, if you call.”

She glanced at Rand, hanging like a sack. “Perhaps,” she said. Darlin turned his head toward Rand’s face with a troubled frown.

Cadsuane was all practicality. “The road lies that way,” she said pointing west. “It will be faster than walking cross-country. An easy stroll.”

Easy was not what Min would have called it. The air seemed twice as hot after the fog’s cold; sweat rolled out of her, and seemed to drain her strength. Her legs wobbled. She tripped over exposed roots and fell flat on her face. She tripped over rocks and fell. She tripped over her own heeled boots and fell. Once her feet just went out from under, and she slid a good forty paces down the hillside on the seat of her breeches, arms flailing until she managed to snag a sapling. Caraline went sprawling as many times, and maybe more; dresses were not made for this sort of travel, and before long—after a tumble head over heels ended with her skirts around her ears—she was asking Min the name of the seamstress who made her coat and breeches. Darlin did not fall. Oh, he stumbled and tripped and skidded every bit as much as they, but whenever he started to fall, something seemed to catch him, to steady him on his feet. In the beginning he glared at the Aes Sedai, all proud Tairen High Lord who would carry Rand out without any help. Cadsuane and the others affected not to see. They never fell; they simply walked along, chatting quietly among themselves, and caught Darlin before he could. By the time they reached the road, he looked both grateful and hunted.

Standing in the middle of the broad road of hard-packed earth, in sight of the river, Cadsuane flung up a hand to stop the first conveyance that appeared, a rickety wagon drawn by two moth-eaten mules and driven by a skinny farmer in a patched coat who hauled on his reins with alacrity. What did the toothless fellow think he had run into? Three ageless Aes Sedai, complete with shawls, who might have stepped down from a coach a moment before. A sweat-soaked Cairhienin woman, of high rank by the stripes on her dress; or maybe a beggar who had clothed herself from a noblewoman’s rag closet, by the state of that dress. An obvious Tairen nobleman, with sweat dripping from his nose and pointed beard and carrying another man across his shoulders like a sack of grain. And herself. Both knees out of her breeches, and another tear in the seat that her coat covered, thank the Light, though one sleeve hung by a few threads. More stains and dust than she wanted to think about.

Not waiting for anyone else, she drew a knife from her sleeve—popping most of those few threads—and gave it a flourish the way Thom Merrilin had taught her, hilt snaking through her fingers so the blade flashed in the sun. “We require a ride to the Sun Palace,” she announced, and Rand himself could not have done better. There were times when being peremptory saved argument.

“Child,” Cadsuane said chidingly, “I’m sure Kiruna and her friends would do everything they could, but there isn’t a Yellow among them. Samitsu and Corele really are two of the best ever. Lady Arilyn has very kindly lent us her palace in the city, so we will take him—”

“No.” Min had no idea where she found the courage to say that word to this woman. Except . . . It was Rand they were talking about. “If he wakes . . . ” She stopped to swallow; he would wake. “If he wakes in a strange place surrounded by strange Aes Sedai again, I can’t imagine what he might do. You don’t want to imagine it.” For a long moment she met that cool gaze, and then the Aes Sedai nodded.

“The Sun Palace,” Cadsuane told the farmer. “And as fast as you make these fleabags move.”

Of course, it was not quite so simple, even for Aes Sedai. Ander Tol had a wagonload of scraggly turnips he intended to sell in the city, and no intention of going anywhere near the Sun Palace, where, he told them, the Dragon Reborn ate people, who were cooked on spits by Aiel women ten feet tall. Not for any number of Aes Sedai would he venture within a mile of the palace. On the other hand, Cadsuane tossed him a purse that made his eyes pop when he looked inside, then told him she had just bought his turnips and hired him and his wagon. If he did not like the notion, he could give the purse back. That with her fists on her hips and a look of her face that said he might just eat his wagon on the spot if he tried giving the purse back. Ander Tol was a reasonable man, it turned out. Samitsu and Niande unloaded the wagon, turnips simply flying into the air to land in a tidy pile by the roadside. By their icy expressions, this was in no way a use to which they had ever expected to put the One Power. By Darlin’s expression, standing there with Rand still on his shoulders, he was relieved they had not called on him to do it. Ander Tol sat the wagon seat with his jaw trying to reach his knees, fingering the purse as though wondering whether it was enough after all.

Once they were settled in the wagon bed, with the straw that had been beneath the turnips all gathered to make a bed for Rand, Cadsuane faced Min across him. Master Tol was flapping his reins and finding a surprising turn of speed in those mules. The wagon lurched and jounced horribly, the wheels not only shaking but apparently out of round. Wishing she had kept just a little of the straw for herself, Min was amused to see Samitsu and Niande growing tighter in the face as they were bounced up and down. Caraline smiled at them quite openly, the High Seat of House Damodred not bothering to hide her pleasure that the Aes Sedai were for once riding rough. Though in truth, slight as she was, she bounced higher and came down with harder thumps than they. Darlin, holding on to the side of the wagon, appeared unaffected however hard he was shaken; he kept frowning and looking from Caraline to Rand.

Cadsuane was another who apparently did not care whether her teeth rattled. “I expect to be there before nightfall, Master Tol,” she called, producing more flapping if no more speed. “Now tell me,” she said, turning to Min. “Exactly what happened the last time this boy woke surrounded by strange Aes Sedai?” Her eyes caught Min’s and held them.

He wanted it kept secret, if it could be, for as long as it could be. But he was dying, and the only chance he had that Min saw rested in these three women. Maybe knowing could not help. Maybe knowing could at least make them understand something of him. “They put him in a box,” she began.

She was not sure how she went on—except that she had to—or how she kept from bursting into tears—except that she was not going to break down again when Rand needed her—but somehow she continued through the confinement and the beatings without a tremor in her voice, right to Kiruna and the rest kneeling to swear fealty. Darlin and Caraline looked stunned. Samitsu and Niande looked horrified. Though not for the reason she would have supposed, it turned out.

“He . . . stilled three sisters?” Samitsu said shrilly. Suddenly she slapped a hand over her mouth and twisted around to lean over the side of the swaying wagon and retch loudly. Niande joined her almost before she began, the pair of them hanging there, emptying their bellies.

And Cadsuane . . . Cadsuane touched Rand’s pale face, brushed strands of hair from his forehead. “Do not be afraid, boy,” she said softly. “They made my task harder, and yours, but I will not hurt you more than I must.” Min turned to ice inside.

Guards at the city gates shouted at the racing wagon, but Cadsuane told Master Tol not to stop, and he flailed at his mules all the harder. People in the streets leaped out of the way to avoid being run down, and the wagon’s progress left behind shouts and curses, overturned sedan chairs, and coaches run into street vendors’ stalls. Through the streets and up the broad ramp to the Sun Palace, where guards in Lord Dobraine’s colors spilled out as though preparing to fight off hordes. While Master Tol was squealing at the top of lungs that Aes Sedai made him do it, the soldiers saw Min. Then they saw Rand. Min had thought she was in a whirlwind before, but she had been wrong.

Two dozen men tried to reach into the wagon at once to lift Rand out, and those who managed to lay hands on him handled him as gently as a babe, four to either side with their arms beneath. Cadsuane must have repeated a thousand times that he was not dead as they hurried into the palace and along corridors that seemed longer than Min remembered, with more Cairhienin soldiers crowding along behind. Nobles began appearing from every doorway and crossing hall, it seemed, faces bloodless, staring as Rand passed. She lost track of Caraline and Darlin, realized she could not remember seeing them since the wagon, and, wishing them well, forgot them. Rand was the only thing she cared about. The only thing in the world.

Nandera was with the Far Dareis Mai guarding the doors to Rand’s rooms, with their gilded Rising Suns. When the graying Maiden saw Rand, stone-faced Aiel composure shattered. “What has happened to him?” she wailed, eyes going wide. “What has happened?” Some of the other Maidens began to moan, a low, hair-raising sound like a dirge.

“Be quiet!” Cadsuane roared, slapping her hands together in a thundercrack. “You, girl. He needs his bed. Hop!” Nandera hopped. Rand was stripped and in his bed in a twinkling, with Samitsu and Niande both hovering over him, the Cairhienin chased out and Nandera at the door repeating Cadsuane’s instructions that he was not to be disturbed by anyone, all so fast Min felt dizzy. She hoped one day to see the confrontation between Cadsuane and the Wise One Sorilea; it had to come, and it would be memorable.

Yet if Cadsuane thought her instructions were really going to keep everyone out, she was mistaken. Before she had more than moved a chair, floating it on the Power, to sit beside Rand’s bed, Kiruna and Bera strode in like the two faces of pride, ruler of a court and ruler of her farmhouse.

“What is this I hear about—?” Kiruna began furiously. She saw Cadsuane. Bera saw Cadsuane. To Min’s amazement, they stopped there with their mouths hanging open.

“He is in good hands,” Cadsuane said. “Unless one of you has suddenly found more Talent for Healing than I recall?”

“Yes, Cadsuane,” they said meekly. “No, Cadsuane.” Min closed her own mouth.

Samitsu took an ivory-inlaid chair against the wall, spreading her dark yellow skirts, and sat with her hands folded, watching Rand’s chest rise and fall beneath the sheet. Niande went to Rand’s bookshelf and selected a book before she sat near the windows. Reading! Kiruna and Bera started to sit, then actually looked to Cadsuane and waited for her impatient nod before they sat down.

“Why aren’t you doing something?” Min shouted.

“That is what I might ask,” Amys said, walking into the room. The youthful, white-haired Wise One stared at Rand for a moment, then shifted her deep brown shawl and turned to Kiruna and Bera. “You may go,” she said. “And Kiruna, Sorilea wishes to see you again.”

Kiruna’s dark face paled, but the pair of them rose and curtsied, murmuring, “Yes, Amys,” even more meekly than for Cadsuane before leaving with embarrassed glances at the Green sister.

“Interesting,” Cadsuane said when they were gone. Her dark eyes locked with Amys’ blue, and Cadsuane, at least, seemed to like what she saw. At any rate, she smiled. “I should like to meet this Sorilea. She is a strong woman?” She seemed to emphasize the word “strong.”

“The strongest I have ever known,” Amys said simply. Calmly. You would never have thought Rand lay senseless in front of her. “I do not know your Healing, Aes Sedai. I trust that you have done what can be done?” Her tone was flat; Min doubted how much Amys did trust.

“What can be done, has been,” Cadsuane sighed. “All we can do now is wait.”

“While he dies?” a man’s harsh voice said, and Min jumped.

Dashiva strode into the room, his plain face contorted in a scowl. “Flinn!” he snapped.

Niande’s book thudded to the floor from apparently nerveless fingers; she stared at the three men in black coats as she would have at the Dark One himself. Pale-faced, Samitsu muttered something that sounded like a prayer.

At Dashiva’s command, the grizzled Asha’man limped to the bed on the opposite side from Cadsuane and began running his hands along the length of Rand’s still body a foot above the sheet. Young Narishma stood frowning by the door, fingering the hilt of his sword, those big dark eyes trying to watch all three Aes Sedai at once. The Aes Sedai, and Amys. He did not look afraid; just a man confidently waiting for those women to show themselves his enemies. Unlike the Aes Sedai, Amys ignored the Asha’man except for Flinn. Her eyes followed him, smooth face utterly expressionless. But her thumb ran along the haft of her belt knife in a very expressive manner.

“What are you doing?” Samitsu demanded, leaping up from her chair. Whatever her unease about Asha’man, concern for her unconscious patient had overcome it. “You, Flinn or whoever you are.” She started toward the bed, and Narishma flowed to block her. Frowning, she tried to go around, and he put a hand on her arm.

“Another boy with no manners,” Cadsuane murmured. Of the three sisters, only she displayed no alarm whatsoever at the Asha’man. Instead, she studied them over steepled fingers.

Narishma flushed at her comment and removed his hand, but when Samitsu tried to go around him again, he once more stepped in front of her.

She settled for glaring past his shoulder. “You, Flinn, what are you doing? I won’t have you killing him with your ignorance! Do you hear me?” Min practically danced from foot to foot. She did not think an Asha’man would kill Rand, not on purpose, but . . . He trusted them, but . . . Light, even Amys did not seem sure, frowning from Flinn to Rand.

Flinn stripped the sheet down to Rand’s waist, exposing the wound. The gash looked neither better nor worse than she remembered, a gaping, angry, bloodless wound slicing across the round scar. He appeared to be sleeping.

“He can’t do any worse than Rand already is,” Min said. Nobody paid her any mind.

Dashiva made a guttural sound, and Flinn looked at him. “You see something, Asha’man?”

“I have no Talent for Healing,” Dashiva said, twisting his mouth wryly. “You’re the one who took my suggestion and learned.”

“What suggestion?” Samitsu demanded. “I insist that you—”

“Be quiet, Samitsu,” Cadsuane said. She seemed to be the only one in the room who was calm aside from Amys, and from the way the Wise One kept stroking her knife hilt, Min was not certain about her. “I think the last thing he wants to do is harm the boy.”

“But, Cadsuane,” Niande began urgently, “that man is—”

“I said, be quiet,” the gray-haired Aes Sedai told her firmly.

“I assure you,” Dashiva said, managing to sound oily and harsh at the same time, “Flinn knows what he is about. Already he can do things you Aes Sedai never dreamed of.” Samitsu sniffed loudly. Cadsuane merely nodded and sat back in her chair.

Flinn traced his finger along the puffy gash in Rand’s side and across the old scar. That did seem more tender. “These are alike, but different, as if there’s two kinds of infection at work. Only it isn’t infection; it’s . . . darkness. I can’t think of a better word.” He shrugged, eyeing Samitsu’s yellow-fringed shawl as she frowned at him, but it was a considering look she gave him now.

“Get on with it, Flinn,” Dashiva muttered. “If he dies . . . ” Nose wrinkled as though at a bad smell, he seemed unable to look away from Rand. His lips moved as he talked to himself, and once he made a sound, half sob, half bitter laugh, without his face changing one line.

Drawing a deep breath, Flinn looked around the room, at the Aes Sedai, at Amys. When he caught sight of Min, he gave a start, and his leathery face reddened. Hastily he rearranged the sheet to cover Rand to his neck, leaving only the old wound and the new exposed.

“I hope nobody minds if I talk,” he said, beginning to move callused hands above Rand’s side. “Talking seems to help a mite.” He squinted, focusing on the injuries, and his fingers writhed slowly. Very much as though he was weaving threads, Min realized. His tone was almost absent, only part of his mind on the words. “It was Healing made me go to the Black Tower, you might say. I was a soldier, till I took a lance in my thigh; couldn’t grip a saddle proper after that, or even walk far. That was the fifteenth wound I took in near forty years in the Queen’s Guards. Fifteen that counted, anyway; it don’t if you can walk or ride, after. I seen a lot of friends die in them forty years. So I went, and the M’Hael taught me Healing. And other things. A rough sort of Healing; I was Healed by an Aes Sedai once—oh, nigh on thirty years back now—and this hurts, compared to that. Works as well, though. Then one day, Dashiva here—pardon; Asha’man Dashiva—says he wonders why it’s all the same, no matter if a man’s got a broke leg or a cold, and we got to talking, and . . . Well, he’s got no feel for it, himself, but me, seems I got the knack you might say. The Talent. So I started thinking, what if I . . . ? There. Best I can do.”

Dashiva grunted as Flinn abruptly sat back on his heels and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Sweat beaded on his face, the first time Min had seen an Asha’man perspire. The slash in Rand’s side was not gone, yet it seemed a little smaller, less red and angry. He still slept, but his face seemed less pale.

Samitsu darted past Narishma so quickly he had no chance to intervene. “What did you do?” she demanded, laying fingers on Rand’s forehead. Whatever she found with the Power, her eyebrows climbed halfway to her hair, and her tone leaped from imperious to incredulous. “What did you do?”

Flinn shrugged his shoulders regretfully. “Not much. I couldn’t really touch what’s wrong. I sort of sealed them away from him, for a time, anyhow. It won’t last. They’re fighting each other, now. Maybe they’ll kill off each other, while he heals himself the rest of the way.” Sighing, he shook his head. “On the other hand, I can’t say that they won’t kill him. But I think he has a better chance than he did.”

Dashiva nodded self-importantly. “Yes; he has a chance, now.” You would have thought he had done the Healing himself.

To Flinn’s evident surprise, Samitsu rounded the bed to help him rise. “You will tell me what you did,” she said, regal tone at strong odds with the way her quick fingers straightened the old man’s collar and smoothed his lapels. “If only there was some way you could show me! But you will describe it. You must! I will give you all the gold I possess, bear your child, whatever you wish, but you will tell me all that you can.” Apparently not sure herself whether she was commanding or begging, she led a very bemused Flinn over by the windows. He opened his mouth more than once, but she was too busy trying to make him talk to see it.

Not caring what anyone thought, Min climbed onto the bed and lay so she could tuck Rand’s head under her chin and wrap her arms around him. A chance. Furtively she studied the three people gathered around the bed. Cadsuane in her chair, Amys standing opposite, Dashiva leaning against one of the square bedposts at the foot, all with unreadable auras and images dancing around them. All with their eyes intent on Rand. No doubt Amys saw some disaster for the Aiel if Rand died, and Dashiva, the only one with any expression, a dark yet worried scowl, disaster for the Asha’man. And Cadsuane . . . Cadsuane, who was not only known to Bera and Kiruna, but made them jump like girls for all their oaths to Rand. Cadsuane, who would not hurt Rand “any more than she had to.”

Cadsuane’s gaze met Min’s for a moment, and Min shivered. Somehow, she would protect him while he could not protect himself, from Amys, and Dashiva, and Cadsuane. Somehow. Unconsciously, she began to hum a lullaby, rocking Rand gently. Somehow.