Winter's Heart

## Chapter 18

#### An Offer

The days after the gholam tried to kill him settled into rhythms that irritated Mat no end. The gray sky never altered, except to give rain or not.

There was talk in the streets of a man being killed by a wolf not far outside the city, his throat ripped. No one was worried, just curious; wolves had not been seen close to Ebou Dar in years. Mat worried. City people might believe a wolf would come that close to city walls, but he knew better. The gholam had not gone away. Harnan and the other Redarms stubbornly refused to leave, claiming they could watch his back, and Vanin refused without reasons, unless a muttered comment that Mat had a good eye for fast horses was supposed to be one. He spat after he said it, though. Riselle, her olive face pretty enough to make a man swallow, her big dark eyes knowing enough to dry his tongue, inquired about Olver’s age, and when he said close on ten, she looked surprised and tapped her full lips thoughtfully, but if she changed anything in the boy’s lessons, he still came away from them bubbling equally over her bosom and the books she read him. Mat thought Olver would almost have given up his nightly games of Snakes and Foxes for Riselle and the books. And when the lad ran out of the rooms that once had been Mat’s, Thom often slipped in with his harp under his arm. By itself that was enough to make Mat grind his teeth, only that was not the half.

Thom and Beslan frequently went out together, not inviting him, and were gone for half the day, or half the night. Neither would say a word more about their schemes, though Thom had the grace to look embarrassed. Mat hoped they were not going to get people killed for nothing, but they showed little interest in his opinions. Beslan glared at the very sight of him. Juilin continued to slip abovestairs and was seen by Suroth, which earned him a strapping hung up by his wrists from a stallpost in the stables. Mat saw his welts tended by Vanin—the man claimed doctoring men was the same as doctoring horses—and warned him it could be worse next time, but the fool was back on the upper floors that very night, still wincing from the weight of his shirt on his back. It had to be a woman, though the thief-catcher refused to say. Mat suspected one of the Seanchan noblewomen. One of the Palace servants could have met him in his own room, with Thom out of it so much.

Not Suroth or Tuon, to be sure, but they were not the only Seanchan High Blood in the Palace. Most of the Seanchan nobles rented rooms, or more often whole houses, in the city, but several had come with Suroth and a handful with the girl, too. More than one of the women looked a pleasant armful in spite of their crested heads and their way of staring down their noses at everybody without shaved temples. If they noticed them more than they did the furniture, that was. If it seemed unlikely that one of those haughty women would look twice at a man who slept in the servant’s quarters, well, the Light knew women had peculiar tastes in men. He had no choice but to leave Juilin alone. Whoever the woman was, she might get the thief-catcher beheaded yet, but that sort of fever had to burn itself out before a man could think straight. Women did strange things to a man’s head.

The newly arrived ships disgorged people and animals and cargo for days on end, enough that the city’s massive walls would have burst from the inside had they all stayed, but they flowed through the city and out into the countryside with their families and their crafts and their livestock, prepared to put down roots. Soldiers passed through in thousands, too, well-ordered infantry and cavalry with the flair of veterans, moving north in bright-colored armor, and east across the river. Mat gave up trying to count them. Sometimes he saw strange creatures, though most of those were unloaded above the city to avoid the streets. Torm like three-eyed bronze-scaled cats the size of horses, sending most real horses around them into a frenzy just by their presence, and corlm, like hairy wingless birds as tall as a man, tall ears twitching constantly and long beaks seeming to yearn for flesh to rend, and huge s’redit with their long noses and longer tusks. Raken and the larger to’raken flew from their landing site below the Rahad, huge lizards spreading wings like bats and carrying men on their backs. The names were easy enough to pick up; any Seanchan soldier was eager to discuss the necessity of scouts on raken and the abilities of corlm at tracking, whether s’redit were useful for more than moving heavy loads and torm too intelligent to trust. He learned a great deal of interest from men who wanted what most soldiers did, a drink and a woman and a bit of a gamble, not necessarily in any given order. Those soldiers were indeed veterans. Seanchan was an Empire larger than all the nations between the Aryth Ocean and the Spine of the World, all under one Empress, but with a history of almost constant rebellions and revolts that kept its soldiers’ skills keen. The farmers would be harder to dig out.

Not all the soldiers left, of course. A strong garrison remained, not only Seanchan, but steel-veiled Taraboner lancers and Amadician pikemen with their breastplates painted to resemble Seanchan armor. And Altarans, too, besides Tylin’s House armsmen. According to the Seanchan, the Altarans from inland, with red slashes crisscrossing their breastplates, were Tylin’s as much as the fellows guarding the Tarasin Palace, which, strangely, did not seem to best please her. It did not please the fellows from inland very much, either. They and the men in Mitsobar’s green-and-white eyed each other like strange tomcats in a small room. There was plenty of glaring going on, Taraboners at Amadicians, Amadicians at Altarans, and the other way round, well-aged, longstanding animosities bubbling to the surface, but no one went further than shaken fists and a few curses. Five hundred men of the Deathwatch Guards had come off the ships and remained in Ebou Dar for some reason. The ordinary sort of crime expected in any large city had fallen off dramatically under the Seanchan, but the Guards took to patrolling the streets as if they expected cutpurses, bullyboys and maybe fully armed bands of brigands to spring out of the pavement. The Altarans and the Amadicians and the Taraboners kept their tempers reined in. No one but a fool argued with the Deathwatch Guards, not more than once. And another contingent of the Guards had taken up residence in the city, too, a hundred Ogier, of all things, in the red-and-black. Sometimes they patrolled with the others, and sometimes they wandered about with their long-handled axes on their shoulders. They were not at all like Mat’s friend Loial. Oh, they had the same wide noses and tufted ears and long eyebrows that drooped to their cheeks beside eyes the size of teacups, but the Gardeners looked at a man as though wondering whether he needed pruning of a few limbs. Nobody at all was fool enough to argue even once with the Gardeners.

Seanchan flowed out from Ebou Dar, and news flowed in. Even when they had to sleep in the attic, merchants preened in the common rooms of inns, smoking their pipes and telling what they knew that no one else did. So long as the telling did not affect their profits. The merchants’ guards cared little for profits they would not share and told everything, some of it true. Seamen spread tales for anyone who would buy a mug of ale, or better, hot spiced wine, and when they had drunk enough, they talked even more, of ports they had visited, and events they had witnessed, and likely dreams they had had after the last time their heads were full of fumes. Still, it was clear the world outside Ebou Dar was seething like the Sea of Storms. Tales of Aiel looting and burning came from everywhere, and armies were on the move other than the Seanchan, armies in Tear and Murandy, in Arad Doman and Andor, in Amadicia, which was not yet entirely under Seanchan control, and dozens of armed gatherings too small to be called armies in the heartland of Altara itself. Except for the men in Altara and Amadicia, no one really seemed sure who intended to fight whom, and there was some doubt about Altara. Altarans had a way of taking advantage of troubles to try paying off grievances against their neighbors.

The news that shook the city most, though, was of Rand. Mat tried his best not to think of him, or Perrin, but avoiding those odd swirls of color in his head was difficult when the Dragon Reborn was on everyone’s lips. The Dragon Reborn was dead, some claimed, murdered by Aes Sedai, by the whole White Tower descending on him at once in Cairhien, or maybe it was in Illian, or Tear. No, they had kidnapped him, and he was held prisoner in the White Tower. No, he had gone to the White Tower on his own and sworn fealty to the Amyrlin Seat. The last gained great credence because a number of men claimed to have seen a proclamation, signed by Elaida herself, that announced as much. Mat had his doubts, about Rand being dead or swearing fealty, at least. For some odd reason, he felt sure he would know if Rand died, and as for the other, he did not believe the man would put himself within a hundred miles of the White Tower voluntarily. Dragon Reborn or no Dragon Reborn, he had to have more sense than that.

That news—all the versions of it—stirred the Seanchan the way a stick stirs an antheap. High-ranking officers strode the halls of the Tarasin Palace at every hour of the day and night, their odd, plumed helmets beneath their arms, their boots ringing on the floor tiles, their faces set. Couriers raced away from Ebou Dar, on horses and on to’raken. Sul’dam and damane began patrolling the streets instead of just standing guard at the gates, once more hunting for women who could channel. Mat kept out of the officers’ way and nodded politely to the sul’dam when he passed one in the streets. Whatever Rand’s situation was, he could do nothing about it in Ebou Dar. First, he had to get out of the city.

The morning after the gholam tried to kill him, Mat burned every last one of the long pink ribbons, the whole great wad of them, in the fireplace as soon as Tylin left her apartments. He also burned a pink coat she had had made for him, two pairs of pink breeches and a pink cloak. A stench of burning wool and silk filled the rooms, and he opened some windows to let it out, but he did not really care. He felt a great relief dressing himself in bright blue breeches and embroidered green coat, and a blue cloak with painfully ornate working. Even all the lace did not bother him. At least none of it was pink. He never wanted to see anything that particular color ever again!

Clapping his hat on his head, he stumped out of the Tarasin Palace with a renewed determination to find that cubbyhole to store what he needed for his escape, if he had to visit every tavern, inn and sailors’ dive in the city ten times over. Even those in the Rahad. A hundred times! Gray gulls and black-winged skimmers swirled in leaden sky that promised more rain, and an icy wind carrying the tang of salt whipped across the Mol Hara, flailing cloaks about. He thumped the paving stones as though intending to crack every one. Light, if need be, he would go with Luca in what he wore. Maybe Luca would let him work his way as a buffoon! The man would probably insist on it. At least that would keep him close to Aludra and her secrets.

He stalked the whole width of the square before he realized that he was in front of a wide white building he knew well. The sign over the arched door proclaimed The Wandering Woman. A tall fellow in red-and-black armor strode out, three thin black plumes on the front of the helmet under his arm, and stood waiting for his horse to be brought around. A bluff-faced man with gray at his temples, he did not look at Mat, and Mat avoided looking at him. No matter how pleasant the man might appear on the surface, he was a Deathwatch Guard, after all, and a banner-general to boot. The Wandering Woman, so near the Palace, had every room rented by high Seanchan officers, and for that reason he had not been back since he was able to walk again. Ordinary Seanchan soldiers were not such bad fellows, ready to gamble half the night and buy a round when it came their turn, but high-ranking officers might as well be nobles. Still, he had to start somewhere.

The common room was almost as he remembered, high-ceilinged and well-lighted by lamps burning on all the walls despite the early hour. Solid shutters covered the tall arched windows now, for warmth, and fires crackled in both long fireplaces. A faint haze of pipesmoke filled the air, and the smell of good cooking from the kitchens. Two women with flutes and a fellow with a drum between his knees were playing a quick, shrill Ebou Dari tune that he nodded in time to. Not so different from when he had stayed there, so far as it went. But all of the chairs held Seanchan, now, some in armor, others in long, embroidered coats, drinking, talking, studying maps spread out on the tables. A graying woman with the flame of a der’sul’dam embroidered on her shoulder seemed to be making a report at one table, and at another a skinny sul’dam with a round-faced damane at her heels appeared to be getting orders. A number of the Seanchan had the sides and backs of their heads shaved so they seemed to be wearing bowls, with the hair remaining at the back left long in a sort of wide tail that hung to the shoulders on men and often to the waist on women. Those were simple lords and ladies, not High anything, but that hardly mattered. A lord was a lord, and besides, the men and women going to fetch a serving maid for more drinks had the smooth-cheeked disdainful look of officers themselves, which meant the folk they were fetching for had rank to cause a man trouble. Several noticed him and frowned, and he almost left.

Then he saw the innkeeper coming down the railless stairs at the back of the room, a stately hazel-eyed woman with large golden hoops in her ears and a little gray in her hair. Setalle Anan was not Ebou Dari, or even Altaran he suspected, but she wore the marriage-knife, hanging hilt-down from a silver collar into a deep narrow neckline, and a long curved blade at her waist. She knew he was supposed to be a lord, but he was not sure how far she believed any longer or what good it would do if she still swallowed the whole taradiddle. In any case, she saw him at the same instant and smiled, a friendly, welcoming smile that made her face even prettier. There was nothing for it but to go and greet her and ask after her health, not too elaborately. Her muscular husband was a fishing-boat captain with more dueling scars than Mat wanted to think about. Straight off she wanted to know about Nynaeve and Elayne, and to his surprise, whether he knew anything about the Kin. He had had no idea she had even heard of them.

“They went with Nynaeve and Elayne,” he whispered, cautiously keeping watch to make sure no Seanchan was paying them any mind. He did not intend to say too much, but talking about the Kin where Seanchan might hear made the back of his neck prickle. “So far as I know, they’re all safe.”

“Good. I would be pained had any of them been collared.” The fool woman did not even lower her voice!

“Yes; that’s good,” he muttered, and hurriedly explained his needs before she could start shouting how happy she was that women who could channel had escaped the Seanchan. He was happy, too, just not happy enough to put himself in chains for joy.

Shaking her head, she seated herself on the steps and put her hands on her knees. Her dark green skirts, sewn up on the left side, showed red petticoats. Ebou Dari really did seem to knock Tinkers on their heels when it came to choosing colors. The buzz of Seanchan voices fought with the high-pitched music all around them, and she sat there looking at him sternly. “You don’t know our ways, that is the trouble,” she said. “Pretties are an old and honored custom in Altara. Many a young man or woman has a final fling as a pretty, pampered and showered with presents, before settling down. But you see, a pretty leaves when she chooses. Tylin shouldn’t be treating you as I hear she is. Still,” she added judiciously, “I must say she dresses you well.” She made a circling motion with one hand. “Hold out your cloak and turn around so I can get a better look.”

Mat drew a deep, calming breath. And then three more. The color flooding his face was sheer fury. He was not blushing. Certainly not! Light, did the whole city know? “Do you have a space I can use or don’t you?” he demanded in a strangled voice.

It turned out that she did. He could use a shelf in her cellar, which she said stayed dry year round, and there was the small hollow under the kitchen’s stone floor where he once had kept his chest of gold. It turned out the rental price was for him to hold out his cloak and turn around so she could get a better look. She grinned like a cat! One of the Seanchan, a buzzard-faced woman in red-and-blue armor, enjoyed the show so much that she tossed him a fat silver coin with strange markings, a forbidding woman’s face on one side and some sort of heavy chair on the other.

Still, he had his place to store clothes and money, and once he returned to the Palace, to Tylin’s apartments, he found out he had clothes to store in it.

“I fear my Lord’s garments are in a terrible state,” Nerim said lugubriously. The skinny, gray-haired Cairhienin would have been as dolorous announcing the gift of a sack of firedrops, though. His long face was perpetually in mourning. He did keep an eye on the door against Tylin’s return, however. “Everything is quite filthy, and I am afraid mildew has ruined several of my Lord’s best coats.”

“They were all in a cupboard with Prince Beslan’s childhood toys, my Lord,” Lopin laughed, tugging at the lapels of a dark coat like Juilin’s. The balding man was the reverse of Nerim, stout instead of bony, dark instead of pale, his round belly always shaking with laughter. For a time after Nalesean’s death it had seemed he intended to compete with Nerim at sighing, the way they did over everything else, but the intervening weeks had recovered him to his normal self. As long as no one mentioned his former master, anyway. “They are dusty, though, my Lord. I doubt anyone has been in that cupboard since the Prince put his toy soldiers away.”

Feeling that his luck was running strong at last, Mat told them to start taking his clothes across to The Wandering Woman a few pieces at a time, and a pocket full of gold each trip. His black-hafted spear, propped in a corner of Tylin’s bedchamber with his unstrung Two Rivers bow, would have to wait for last. Getting that out might be as difficult as getting himself out. He could always make a new bow for himself, but he was not going to abandon the ashandarei.

I paid too high a price for the bloody thing to leave it, he thought, fingering the scar hidden beneath the scarf around his neck. One of the first, among too many. Light, it would be nice to think that he had more to look forward to than scars and battles he did not want. And a wife he did not want or even know. There had to be more than that. First came getting out of Ebou Dar with a whole hide, though. That above all else, first.

Lopin and Nerim bowed themselves out of his presence with the equivalent of two fat purses spread about their clothing, so as not to create any bulges, but no sooner had they gone than Tylin appeared, wanting to know why his bodyservants were running in the halls as though racing each other. If he had been feeling suicidal he could have told her they were racing to see who would be first to reach the inn with his gold, or maybe just the first to start cleaning his clothes. Instead he busied himself diverting her, and soon enough that chased any other thoughts out of his head, except for a glimmer that his luck had finally begun to pay off at something besides gambling. All it needed to put the cap on would be for Aludra to give him what he wanted before he left. Tylin put her mind to what she was doing, and for a time he forgot fireworks and Aludra and escaping. For a time.

After a little searching through the city, he finally located a bellfounder. There were a number of gongmakers in Ebou Dar, but only one bellmaker, with a foundry outside the western wall. The bellmaker, a cadaverous, impatient fellow, sweated in the heat of his huge iron furnace. The sweltering foundry’s one long room might have been some sort of torture chamber. Hoisting chains dangled from the rafters, and sudden flames gouted from the furnace, throwing flickering shadows and leaving Mat half-blind. And no sooner would he blink away the afterimage of raging fire than another eruption would leave him squinting again. Workmen dripping with sweat poured molten bronze from the furnace’s melting pot into a square mold, half again as tall as a man, that had been levered into position on rollers. Other great molds like it stood around the stone floor, amid a litter of smaller molds in various sizes.

“My Lord is pleased to jest.” Master Sutoma forced a chuckle, but he did not look amused, with his damp black hair hanging down and clinging to his face. His chuckle sounded as hollow as his cheeks, and he kept shooting frowns at his workmen as though suspecting they would lie down and go to sleep if he did not maintain a dose watch on them. A dead man could not have slept in that heat. Mat’s shirt stuck to him damply, and he was beginning to sweat his coat through in patches. “I know nothing of Illuminators, my Lord, and I wish to know nothing. Useless fripperies, fireworks. Not like bells. If my Lord will excuse me? I am very busy. The High Lady Suroth has commissioned thirteen bells for a victory set, the largest bells ever cast anywhere. And Calwyn Sutoma will cast them!” That it was a victory over his own city did not seem to bother Sutoma in the least. The last was enough to make him grin and rub his bony hands together.

Mat attempted to make Aludra relent, but the woman might as well have been cast bronze herself. Well, she was considerably softer than bronze once she finally let him put an arm around her, yet kisses that left her trembling did nothing to slacken her resolve.

“Me, I do not believe in telling a man more than he needs to know,” she said breathlessly, sitting beside him on a padded bench in her wagon. She allowed no more than kisses, but she was very enthusiastic about those. The thin beaded braids she had taken to wearing again were a tangle. “Men gossip, yes? Chatter, chatter, chatter, and you yourselves don’t know what you will say next. Besides, maybe I have made you the puzzle just to make you return, yes?” And she set about further disarraying her hair, and his as well.

She put up no more nightflowers, though, not after he told her about the chapter house in Tanchico. He tried two more visits to Master Sutoma, but on the second, the bellmaker had the doors barred against him. He was casting the largest bells ever made, and no foolish foreigner with foolish questions would be allowed to interfere with that.

Tylin began lacquering the first two fingernails on each hand green, though she did not shave the sides of her head. She would, eventually, she told him, pulling her flowing hair back with her hands to study herself in the gilt-framed mirror on the bedchamber wall, but she wanted to become used to the idea first. She was making her accommodations with the Seanchan, and he could not fault her for it, no matter how many dark scowls Beslan gave his mother.

There was no way she could suspect anything about Aludra, but the day after he first kissed the Illuminator, the grandmotherly maids disappeared from her chambers, replaced by women white-haired and wizened. Tylin began sticking her curved belt knife into one of the bedposts at night, close to hand, and musing aloud in his hearing about how he would look in a da’covale’s sheer robes. In fact, night was not the only time she stuck her knife in the bedpost. Grinning serving women started delivering summonses to Tylin’s rooms by simply telling him that she had stabbed the bedpost, and he started trying to avoid any woman in livery he saw with a smile on her face. It was not that he disliked being bedded by Tylin, aside from the fact she was a queen, as snooty as any other noblewoman. And the fact that she made him feel like a mouse that had been made a pet by a cat. But there were only so many hours of daylight, if more than he was used to back home in winter, and for a bit he had to wonder whether she meant to consume all of them.

Luckily, Tylin began spending more and more time with Suroth and Tuon. Her accommodations seemed to have embraced friendship, with Tuon at least. No one could be friends with Suroth. Tylin seemed to have adopted the girl, or the girl had adopted her. Tylin told him little of what they talked about except in the sketchiest outlines, and often not even that, but they closeted themselves alone for hours, and swept along the Palace corridors conversing quietly, or sometimes laughing. Frequently Anath or Selucia, Tuon’s golden-haired so’jhin, trailed along behind, and now and then a pair of hard-eyed Deathwatch Guards.

He still could not figure out the relationship between Suroth, Tuon and Anath. On the surface, Suroth and Tuon behaved as equals, calling each other by name, laughing at one another’s jests. Tuon certainly never gave Suroth any order, at least not in his hearing, but Suroth seemed to take Tuon’s suggestions as orders. Anath, on the other hand, badgered the girl unmercifully with razor-sharp criticisms, calling her a fool and worse.

“This is the worst sort of stupidity, girl,” he heard her say coldly one midday in the halls. Tylin had not sent her crude summons—yet—and he was trying to sneak out before she could, slipping along the walls and peeking around corners. He had a visit to Sutoma planned, and another to Aludra. The three Seanchan women—four, counting Selucia, but he did not think they saw it that way—were clustered just around the next turning. Trying to keep an eye out for serving women wearing a smile, he waited impatiently for them to move. Whatever they were talking about, they would not appreciate him blundering by in the middle of it. “A taste of the strap will set you right, and clear your head of nonsense,” the tall woman went on in a voice like ice. “Ask for it and be done.”

Mat worked a finger in his ear, and shook his head. He must have misheard. Selucia, standing placidly with her hands folded at her waist, certainly never turned a hair.

Suroth gasped, though. “Surely you will punish her for this!” she drawled angrily, glaring holes through Anath. Or trying to. Suroth might as well have been a chair for all the notice the tall woman gave her.

“You do not understand, Suroth.” Tuon’s sigh stirred the veil covering her face. Covering but not concealing. She looked . . . resigned. He had been shocked to learn she was only a few years younger than he. He would have said more like ten. Well, six or seven. “The omens say otherwise, Anath,” the girl said calmly, and not at all in anger. She was simply stating facts. “Be assured, I will tell you if they change.”

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked back into the face of a serving woman wearing a broad grin. Well, he had not really been that anxious to go out right away.

Tuon troubled him. Oh, when they passed in the hallways, he made his best leg politely, and in return she ignored him as completely as Suroth or Anath did, but it began to seem to him that they passed in the hallways a little too often.

One afternoon, he walked into Tylin’s apartments, having checked and found out that Tylin was shut up with Suroth on some business or other, and in the bedchamber, he found Tuon examining his ashandarei. He froze at the sight of her fingering the words in the Old Tongue carved into the black shaft. A raven in some still darker metal was inlaid at each end of the line of script, and a pair of them engraved on the slightly curved blade. Ravens were an Imperial sigil, to the Seanchan. Not breathing, he tried to move backwards without making a sound.

That veiled face swivelled toward him. A pretty face, really, it might even have been beautiful if she ever stopped looking as though she was about to bite off a mouthful of wood. He no longer thought she looked like a boy—those tight wide belts she always wore made sure you noticed what curves there were—but she was the next thing to it. He seldom saw a grown woman younger than his grandmother that he did not at least think idly of what it would be like dancing with her, maybe kissing her, even those snooty Seanchan Blood, but never a glimmer of that crossed his mind with Tuon. A woman had to have something to put an arm around, or what was the point?

“I don’t see Tylin owning a thing like this,” she drawled coolly, setting the long-bladed spear back next to his bow, “so it must be yours. What is it? How did you come to possess it?” Those cold demands for information set his jaw. The bloody woman could have been ordering a servant. Light, as far as he was aware, she did not even know his name! Tylin said she had never asked about him or mentioned him since the offer of purchase.

“It’s called a spear, my Lady,” he said, resisting the urge to lean against the doorframe and tuck his thumbs behind his belt. She was Seanchan Blood, after all. “I bought it.”

“I will give you ten times the price you paid,” she said. “Name it.”

He almost laughed. He wanted to, and not for pleasure, that was certain sure. No would you think of selling, just I will buy it and here is what I will pay. “The price wasn’t gold, my Lady.” Involuntarily, his hand went to the black scarf to make sure it still hid the ridged scar that encircled his neck. “Only a fool would pay it one time, let alone ten.”

She studied him for a moment, her expression unreadable no matter how sheer her veil. And then, he might as well have vanished. She glided past him as though he were no longer there and swept out of the apartments.

That was not the only time he encountered her alone. Of course, she was not always followed by Anath or Selucia, or guards, yet it seemed to him that rather too often he would decide to go back for something and turn to find her by herself, looking at him, or he might leave a room suddenly and find her outside the door. More than once he looked over his shoulder leaving the Palace and saw her veiled face peering out of a window. True, there was nothing of staring about it. She looked at him and glided away as though he had ceased to exist, peered from a window and turned back into the room as soon as he saw her. He was a stand lamp in the corridor, a paving stone in the Mol Hara. It began to make him nervous, though. After all, the woman had offered to buy him. A thing like that had a tendency to make a man nervous by its own self.

Even Tuon could not truly upset his welling sense that things were finally coming right, though. The gholam did not return, and he began to think maybe it had gone on an easier “harvest.” In any event, he was staying away from dark and lonely places where it might have a chance at him. His medallion was all very well for what it did, but a good crowd was better. On his latest visit to Aludra she had almost let something slip—he was certain of it—before coming to herself and hastily bundling him out of her wagon. There was nothing a woman would not tell you if you kissed her enough. He stayed away from The Wandering Woman, to avoid rousing Tylin’s suspicions, but Nerim and Lopin stealthily transferred his real clothing to the inn’s cellar. Bit by bit, half the contents of the iron-bound chest under Tylin’s bed traveled across the Mol Hara to the hidden hollow beneath the inn’s kitchen.

That hollow under the kitchen floor began to trouble him, though. It had been good enough for hiding the chest. A man could break chisels getting into that. He had been living upstairs at the inn then, too. Now the gold would be just spilled into the hole after Setalle cleared the kitchen. What if someone began to wonder why she chased everybody out when Lopin and Nerim came? Anybody at all could lift up that floorstone, if they knew where to look. He had to make sure for himself. Afterwards, long afterwards, he would wonder why the bloody dice had not warned him.