The Fires of Heaven

## Chapter 37

#### Performances in Samara

For what seemed the hundredth time, Nynaeve held a lock of her hair up to look at it and sighed. Thick murmurs of talk and laughter from hundreds if not thousands of throats, distant music that was nearly drowned out, drifted in through the wagon walls. She had not minded spending the parade through the streets of Samara in the wagon with Elayne—occasional peeks through the windows had convinced her that she would just as soon not be out in those packed crowds, yelling and barely making way for the wagons—but every time she looked at the brassy red of her hair, she wished she had been doing somersaults with the Chavanas rather than dyeing it.

Carefully not looking at herself, she wrapped up completely in her plain dark gray shawl, turned, and gave a start to find Birgitte standing in the doorway. The woman had ridden in Clarine and Petra’s wagon during the parade, with Clarine altering a spare red dress she had been making for Nynaeve at Luca’s direction; he had given Clarine her instructions before Nynaeve ever agreed. Birgitte wore it now, her black-dyed braid pulled over her shoulder so it nestled between her breasts, totally unconscious of the low square neck. Just looking at her made Nynaeve fold her shawl tighter; Birgitte could not show a fingernail more of pale bosom and retain the slightest claim to decency. As it was, such a claim would be feeble, really quite laughable. Looking at her made Nynaeve’s stomach knot up, but not for reasons of clothes or skin.

“If you are going to wear the dress, why cover up?” Birgitte came inside and closed the door behind her. “You are a woman. Why not be proud of it?”

“If you think I shouldn’t,” Nynaeve replied hesitantly, and slowly let the shawl slide down to her elbows, revealing the twin of the other woman’s garment. She felt all but naked. “I only thought . . . I thought . . . ” Gripping her silk skirts hard to keep her hands at her sides, she held her gaze on the other woman. Even knowing she wore exactly the same herself, it was easier that way.

Birgitte grimaced. “And if I wanted you to lower the neck another inch?”

Nynaeve opened her mouth, face going as scarlet as the gown, but for a moment nothing came out. When it did, she sounded as if she were being strangled. “There isn’t an inch to lower it. Look at your own. There isn’t a tenth!”

Three quick, frowning strides, and Birgitte bent slightly to put her face right in Nynaeve’s. “And if I said I wanted you to rid yourself of that inch?” she snarled, showing teeth. “What if I wanted to paint your face, so Luca could have his fool? What if I stripped you out of it altogether and painted you from head to toe? A fine target you would make then. Every man inside fifty miles would come to see.”

Nynaeve’s mouth worked, but this time no sound emerged at all. She wanted very much to close her eyes; maybe when she opened them, none of this would be happening.

With a disgusted shake of her head, Birgitte took a seat on one of the beds, one elbow on her knee and her blue eyes sharp. “This must stop. When I look at you, you flinch. You run about waiting on me hand and foot. If I glance for a stool, you fetch one. If I lick my lips, you have a cup of wine in my hands before I know I am thirsty. You would wash my back and put the slippers on my feet if I let you. I am neither monster nor invalid nor child, Nynaeve.”

“I am only trying to make up for—” she began timidly, and jumped when the other woman roared.

“Make up? You are trying to make me less!”

“No. No, it is not that, truly. I am to blame—”

“You take responsibility for my actions,” Birgitte broke in fiercely. “I chose to speak to you in Tel’aran’rhiod. I chose to help you. I chose to track Moghedien. And I chose to take you to see her. Me! Not you, Nynaeve, me! I was not your puppet, your pack hound, then, and I will not be now.”

Nynaeve swallowed hard and gripped her skirts more tightly. She had no right to be angry with this woman. No right at all. But Birgitte had every right. “You did what I asked. It is my fault that you . . . that you are here. It is all my fault!”

“Have I mentioned fault? I see none. Only men and dim-witted girls take blame where there is none, and you are neither.”

“It was my foolish pride that made me think I could best her again, and my cowardice that let her . . . that let her . . . If I had not been so afraid I could not spit, I might have done something in time.”

“A coward?” Birgitte’s eyes widened, openly incredulous, and scorn touched her voice. “You? I thought you had more sense than to confuse fear with cowardice. You could have fled Tel’aran’rhiod when Moghedien released you, but you stayed to fight. No fault or blame to you that you could not.” Drawing a deep breath, she rubbed her forehead for a moment, then leaned forward intently again. “Listen to me close, Nynaeve. I take no blame for what was done to you. I saw, but I could not twitch. Had Moghedien tied you into a knot or cored you like an apple, still I would take no blame. I did what I could, when I could. And you did the same.”

“It was not the same.” Nynaeve tried to take the heat out of her voice. “It was my fault that you were there. My fault that you are here. If you . . . ” She stopped to swallow again. “If you . . . miss . . . when you shoot at me today, I want you to know that I will understand.”

“I do not miss where I aim,” Birgitte said dryly, “and where I aim will not be at you.” She began taking things from one of the cabinets and laying them on the small table. Half-finished arrows, scraped shafts, steel arrow points, stone glue pot, fine cord, gray goose feathers for fletchings. She had said she would make her own bow, too, as soon as she could. Luca’s she called “a knot-riddled branch broken from a cross-grained tree by a blind idiot in the middle of the night.”

“I liked you, Nynaeve,” she said as she laid everything out. “Thorns, warts and all. I no longer do, as you are now . . . ”

“You have no reason to like me, now,” Nynaeve said miserably, but the other woman spoke right over her without looking up.

“ . . . and I will not allow you to make me less, to make my decisions less, by claiming responsibility for them. I have had few women friends, but most have had tempers like snowghosts.”

“I wish you could be my friend once more.” What under the Light was a snowghost? Something from another Age, no doubt. “I would never try to make you less, Birgitte. I only—”

Birgitte paid her no mind, except to raise her voice. Her attention seemed all on her arrow shafts. “I would like to like you again, whether you return the liking or not, but I cannot until you are yourself again. I could live with you a milk-tongued sniveling wretch if that was what you were. I take people as they are, not as I would like them to be, or else I leave them. But that is not what you are, and I will not accept your reasons for playing at it. So. Clarine told me of your encounter with Cerandin. Now I know what to do the next time you claim my decisions as your own.” She swished a length of ashwood vigorously. “I am sure Latelle will be happy to provide the switch.”

Nynaeve forced her jaws to unclench, forced her tone as smooth as she could make it. “You have a perfect right to do whatever you wish to me.” Her fists in her skirts quivered more than her voice.

“A touch of temper showing? Just at the edges?” Birgitte grinned at her, at once amused and startlingly feral. “How long before it bursts into flame? I am willing to wear out any number of switches, if need be.” The grin faded into seriousness. “I will make you see the right of this, or I will drive you away. There is no other course. I cannot—will not—leave Elayne. That bond honors me, and I will honor it, and her. And I will not allow you to think that you make my decisions, or made them. I am myself, not an appendage to you. Now go away. I must finish these arrows if I am to have even a few shafts that will fly true. I do not mean to kill you, and I would not have it happen by accident.” Unstopping the glue pot, she bent over the table. “Do not forget to curtsy like a good girl on your way out.”

Nynaeve made it as far as the foot of the steps before pounding her fist on her thigh in a fury. How dare the woman? Did she think that she could just . . . ? Did she think that Nynaeve would put up with . . . ? I thought she could do anything she wanted to you, a small voice whispered in her head. I said she could kill me, she snarled at it, not humiliate me! Before much longer everybody would be threatening her with that bloody Seanchan woman!

The wagons stood abandoned, except for a few rough-coated horse handlers for guards, near the tall sprawling canvas fence erected to contain Luca’s show. From this large brown-grass meadow half a mile from Samara the gray stone walls of the city were clearly visible, with squat towers at the gates, and a few of the taller buildings showing roofs of thatch or tile. Outside the walls, villages of huts and rude shanties sprouted like mushrooms in every direction, full of the Prophet’s followers, and they had stripped every tree for miles either for building or for firewood.

The show’s entrance for patrons was on the other side, but two of the horse handlers with stout cudgels stood on this side to discourage any who did not want to pay from entering as the performers did. Nynaeve was almost upon them, striding as hard as she could and muttering angrily to herself, when their idiotic grins made her realize that the shawl was still looped over her elbows. Her stare wiped their faces blank. Only then did she cover herself properly, and slowly; she was not about to have these louts think they could make her yelp and leap. The skinny one, with a nose that took up half of his face, held the canvas flap aside, and she ducked through into pandemonium.

Everywhere people thronged, in noisy milling clusters of men and women and children, in chattering streams flowing from one attraction to the next. All but the s’redit performed on raised wooden stages Luca had had built. Cerandin’s boar-horses had the largest crowd, the huge gray animals actually balancing on their forelegs, even the baby, long snouts curved up sinuously, while Clarine’s dogs had the smallest, for all they did back-springs and flips over each others’ backs. A good many people paused to stare at the lions and the hairy boarlike capars in their cages, the strangely horned deer from Arafel and Saldaea and Arad Doman and the bright birds from the Light knew where, and some waddling, brown-furred creatures with big eyes and round ears that sat placidly eating leaves from branches gripped in their forepaws. Luca’s tale on where they came from varied—she supposed he did not know—and he had not been able to make up a name for them that pleased him. A huge snake from the marshes of Illian, four times as long as a man, earned nearly as many gasps as the s’redit, although simply lying there, apparently asleep, but she was pleased to see that Latelle’s bears, at the moment standing atop huge red wooden balls that they rolled in circles with their feet, attracted few more than the dogs. Bears these people could see in their own forests, even if these did have white faces.

Latelle sparkled in the afternoon sunlight in her black spangles. Cerandin glittered almost as much in blue, and Clarine in green, though neither had quite as many sequins sewn on as Latelle, but every last one of the dresses had a collar right up under the chin. Of course, Petra and the Chavanas were performing attired only in bright blue breeches, but that was to show off their muscles. Only understandable. The acrobats were standing one atop the other’s shoulders, four high. Not far from them, the strongman took a long bar with a large iron ball at each end—two men were needed to hand the thing up to him—and immediately began twirling it in his thick hands, even spinning the bar around his neck and across his back.

Thom was juggling fire, and eating it as well. Eight flaming batons made a perfect circle: then suddenly he had four in each hand, one sticking up from each cluster. Deftly popping each upraised flaming end into his mouth in turn, he appeared to swallow, and took them out extinguished, looking as if he had just had something tasty. Nynaeve could not fathom how he did not scorch his mustaches off, much less burn his throat. A twist of his wrists, and the unlit batons folded into the lit like fans. A moment later they were making two interlinked circles above his head. He wore the same brown coat he always did, though Luca had given him a red one sewn with sequins. From the way Thom’s bushy eyebrows rose as she stalked past, he did not understand why she glared at him. His own coat, indeed!

She hurried on toward the thick, impatiently buzzing crowd circled around the two tall poles with the rope stretched tightly between. She had to use her elbows to reach the front row, though two women did glare and snatch their men out of her way when the shawl slipped. She would have glared back had she not been so busy blushing and covering herself. Luca was there, frowning as anxiously as a husband outside a birthing room, next to a thick fellow with his head shaved except for a grizzled topknot. She slipped in on the other side of Luca. The shaven-headed man had a villainous look; a long scar sliced down his left cheek, and a patch over that eye was painted with a scowling red replacement. Few of the men she had seen here were armed with more than a belt knife, but he wore a sword strapped to his back, the long hilt rising above his right shoulder. He looked vaguely familiar for some reason, but her mind was all on the highrope. Luca frowned at the shawl, smiled at her, and tried to put an arm around her waist.

While he was still trying to catch his breath from her elbow and she was still getting her shawl decently back in place, Juilin came staggering out of the crowd on the other side, conical red hat tilted jauntily, coat half off one shoulder and a wooden mug in his fist slopping over the rim. With the over-careful steps of a man whose head contains more wine than brains, he approached the rope ladder leading up to one of the high platforms and stared at it.

“Go on!” someone shouted. “Break your fool neck!”

“Wait, friend,” Luca called, starting forward with smiles and flourishes of his cloak. “That is no place for a man with a belly full of—”

Setting the mug on the ground, Juilin scampered up the ladder and stood swaying on the platform. Nynaeve held her breath. The man had a head for heights, and well he should after a life of chasing thieves across the rooftops of Tear, but still . . .

Juilin turned as if lost; he appeared too drunk to see or remember the ladder. His eyes fixed on the rope. Tentatively, he put one foot onto the narrow span, then drew it back. Pushing the hat back to scratch his head, he studied the taut rope, and abruptly brightened visibly. Slowly he got down on hands and knees and crawled wobbling out onto the rope. Luca shouted for him to come down, and the crowd roared with laughter.

Halfway across, Juilin stopped, swaying awkwardly, and peered back, his eyes latching onto the mug he had left on the ground. Plainly he was considering how to get back to it. Slowly, with exceeding care, he stood, facing the way he had come and wavering from side to side. A gasp rose from the crowd as his foot slipped and he fell, somehow catching himself with one hand and a knee hooked around the rope. Luca caught the Taraboner hat as it fell, shouting to everyone that the man was mad, and whatever happened was no responsibility of his. Nynaeve pressed both hands tight against her middle; she could imagine being up there, and even that was enough to make her feel ill. The man was a fool. A pure bull-goose fool!

With an obvious effort, Juilin managed to catch the rope with his other hand, and pulled himself along it hand-over-hand. To the far platform. Swaying from side to side, he brushed his coat, tried to pull it straight and succeeded only in changing which shoulder hung down—and spotted his mug at the floor of the other pole. Pointing to it gleefully, he stepped out onto the rope again.

This time at least half the onlookers shouted for him to go back, shouted that there was a ladder behind him; the others only laughed uproariously, no doubt waiting for him to break his neck. He walked across smoothly, slid down the rope ladder with his hands and feet on the outside, and snatched up the wooden mug to take a deep drink. Not until Luca clapped the red hat on Juilin’s head and they both bowed—Luca flourishing his cloak in such a way that Juilin was behind it half the time—did the watchers realize that it had all been part of the show. A moment of silence, and then they exploded with applause and cheers and laughter. Nynaeve had half thought they might turn ugly after being duped. The fellow with the topknot looked villainous even while laughing.

Leaving Juilin standing beside the ladder, Luca came back to stand between, Nynaeve and the man with the topknot. “I thought that would go well.” He sounded incredibly self-satisfied, and he made little bows to the crowd as if he had been the one up on the rope.

Giving him a sour frown, she had no time to speak the acid comment on her tongue, because Elayne came bounding through the crowd to stand beside Juilin with her arms upraised and one knee bent.

Nynaeve’s mouth tightened, and she shifted her shawl irritably. Whatever she thought of the red dress that she had found herself wearing without really knowing how, she was not sure that Elayne’s costume was not worse. The Daughter-Heir of Andor was all in snow white, with a scattering of white sequins sparkling on her short coat and snug breeches. Nynaeve had not really believed that Elayne would actually appear in the clothes in public, but she had been too concerned over her own attire to give her opinion. The coat and breeches made her think of Min. She had never approved of Min wearing boy’s clothes, but the color and spangles made these even more—flagrant.

Juilin held the rope ladder for Elayne to climb, though there was no need. She went up as adeptly as he could have. He vanished into the crowd as soon as she reached the top, where she posed again, beaming at the thunderous applause as if at the adulation of her subjects. As she stepped out onto the rope—somehow it seemed even thinner than when Juilin had been on it—Nynaeve all but ceased breathing, and she stopped thinking of Elayne’s clothes, or her own, at all.

Elayne made her way out onto the rope, arms outstretched to either side, and she was not channeling a platform of Air. Slowly she stepped her way across, one foot in front of the other, never wavering, supported only by the rope. Channeling would be far too dangerous if Moghedien had even a clue to where they were; the Forsaken or Black sisters could be in Samara, and they would be able to feel the weave. And if they were not in Samara now, they might be soon. On the far platform, Elayne paused to considerably more applause than Juilin had received—Nynaeve could not understand that—and started back. Almost to the end, she pivoted smoothly, walked back halfway, pivoted again. And wobbled, just catching herself. Nynaeve felt as though a hand had her by the throat. At a slow steady pace, Elayne high-walked to the platform, once more posing to thunderous shouts and clapping.

Nynaeve swallowed her heart and breathed again, raggedly, but she knew it was not over.

Raising her hands above her head, Elayne suddenly cartwheeled herself along the rope, black tresses whipping, white-sheathed legs flashing in the sun. Nynaeve yelped and clutched Luca’s arm as the girl reached the far platform, stumbled in landing and caught herself just short of going over the edge.

“What’s the matter?” he murmured beneath the gasp rising from the crowd. “You’ve seen her do this every evening since Sienda. And a good many other places, too, I would think.”

“Of course,” she said weakly. Eyes fixed on Elayne, she barely noticed the arm he slipped around her shoulders, certainly not enough to do anything about it. She had tried to talk the girl into feigning a sprained ankle, but Elayne insisted that after all of that practice with the Power, she did not need it now. Maybe Juilin did not—apparently he did not—but Elayne had never gone scrambling over rooftops in the night.

The return cartwheels went perfectly, and the landing, but Nynaeve did not look away, or loose her hold on Luca’s sleeve. After what now seemed the inevitable pause for applause, Elayne returned to the rope for more pivots, one leg raised and whipping down and up so quickly that it seemed she kept it outstretched the whole while, and for a slow handstand that lifted her straight as a dagger, white-slippered toes pointed to the sky. And a backflip that had the crowd gasping and her swaying from side to side, only just catching her balance. Thom Merrilin had taught her that, and the handstand.

From the corner of her eye Nynaeve caught Thom, two places down from her, eyes riveted to Elayne, poised on the balls of his feet. He looked as proud as a peacock. He looked ready to rush forward and catch her if she fell. If she did fall, it would be at least partly his fault. He should never have taught her those things!

One last passage of cartwheels, white legs flashing and glittering in the sun, faster than before. A passage that had never been mentioned to Nynaeve! She would have eviscerated Luca with her tongue had he not muttered angrily that Elayne adding to the act just for applause was a good way to break her neck. One last pause to pose for more of that applause and Elayne at last climbed down.

Shouting, the crowd rushed in on her. Luca and four horse handlers with cudgels appeared around her as if by the Power, but even so Thom beat them to her, limp and all.

Nynaeve jumped as high as she could, just managing to see over enough heads to make out Elayne. The girl did not seem frightened, or even taken aback, by all the waving hands trying to touch her, stretching between her encircling guards. Head high, face flushed from effort, she still managed a cool and regal grace as she was escorted away. How she could do that, garbed as she was, Nynaeve simply could not imagine.

“Face like a bloody queen,” the one-eyed man muttered to himself. He had not gone running with the others, but merely let them stream past. Roughly dressed in a plain coat of dark gray wool, he certainly looked solid enough to have no fears of being knocked down and trampled. He appeared as if he could use that sword. “Burn me for a sheep-gutted farmer, but she’s flaming well brave enough for a bloody queen.”

Nynaeve gaped at him as he strode away through the crowd, and it was not his language. Or rather, it was, partly. Now she remembered where she had seen him, a one-eyed man with a topknot who could not say two sentences without the vilest curses.

Forgetting about Elayne—she was certainly safe enough—Nynaeve began pushing her way through the throng after him.