A Crown of Swords (59 page)

“Rather ornate, wouldn’t you say?” Cadsuane said to Annoura, looking around. Aside from all the other gold, broad bands of it ran around the walls above the mirrors, and the cornices were nearly two feet of golden scales. “I’ve never known whether Cairhienin or Tairens overdo worse, but either can make an Ebou Dari blush, or even a Tinker. Is that a tea tray? I would like some, if it’s fresh, and hot.”

Channeling, Rand scooped up the tray, half expecting to see the metal corrode from the taint, and wafted it to the three women. Merana had brought extra cups, and four still stood unused on the tray. He filled three, replaced the teapot and waited. It floated in midair, supported by
saidin.

Three very different women in appearance, and three distinctly different reactions. Annoura looked at the tray much as one might a coiled viper, gave a tiny shake of her head, and took a small step back. Merana drew a deep breath and slowly picked up a cup with a hand that trembled slightly. Knowing a man could channel and being forced to see it were not at all the same. Cadsuane, though, took her cup and sniffed the vapors with a pleased smile. Nothing could tell her which of the three men had poured the tea, yet she looked across her cup straight at Rand, lounging with one leg over the arm over his chair. “That’s a good boy,” she said. The Maidens passed shocked looks above their veils.

Rand quivered. No. She would not provoke him. For whatever reason, that was what she wanted, and she would not! “I will ask one more time,” he said. Strange, that his voice could be that cold; inside, he was hotter than the hottest fires of
saidin.
“What do you want? Answer, or leave. By the door or a window; your choice.”

Again Merana began to speak, and again Cadsuane silenced her, this time by a sharp gesture without looking away from him. “To see you,” she said calmly. “I am Green Ajah, not Red, but I have worn the shawl longer than any other sister living, and I have faced more men who could channel than any four Reds, maybe than any ten. Not that I hunted them, you understand, but I seem to have a nose.” Calmly, a woman saying she had been to market once or twice in her life. “Some fought to the bitter end, kicking and screaming even after they were shielded and bound. Some wept and begged, offering gold, anything, their very souls, not to be taken to Tar Valon. Still others wept from relief, meek as lambs, thankful finally to be done with it. Light’s truth, they all weep, at the end. There is nothing left for them but tears at the end.”

The heat inside him erupted in rage. Tray and massive teapot hurtled across the room, smashing a mirror with a thunderous crash and bouncing back in a shower of glass, half-flattened pot spraying tea, tray spinning across the floor bent double. Everyone jumped except Cadsuane. Rand leaped from the dais, clutching the Dragon Scepter so hard his knuckles hurt. “Is that supposed to frighten me?” he growled. “Do you expect me to beg, or to be thankful? To weep? Aes Sedai, I could close my hand and crush you.” The hand he held up shook with fury. “Merana knows why I should. The Light only knows why I don’t.”

The woman looked at the battered tea things as if she had all the time in the world. “Now you know,” she said at last, calm as ever, “that I know your future, and your present. The Light’s mercy fades to nothing for a man who can channel. Some see that and believe the Light denies those men. I do not. Have you begun to hear voices, yet?”

“What do you mean?” he asked slowly. He could feel Lews Therin listening.

The tingle returned to his skin, and he very nearly channeled, but all that happened was that the teapot rose and floated to Cadsuane, turning slowly in the air for her to examine. “Some men who can channel begin to hear voices.” She spoke almost absently, frowning at the flattened sphere of silver and gold. “It is a part of the madness. Voices conversing with them, telling them what to do.” The teapot drifted gently to the floor by her feet. “Have you heard any?”

Startlingly, Dashiva gave a raucous laugh, shoulders shaking. Narishma wet his lips; he might not have been afraid of the woman before, but now he watched her closely as a scorpion.

“I will ask the questions,” Rand said firmly. “You seem to forget. I am
the Dragon Reborn.”
You
are
real, aren’t you?
he wondered. There was no answer. Lews Therin? Sometimes the man did not answer, but Aes Sedai always drew him.
Lews Therin?
He was not mad; the voice was real, not imagination. Not madness. A sudden desire to laugh did not help.

Cadsuane sighed. “You are a young man who has little idea where he is going or why, or what lies ahead. You seem overwrought. Perhaps we can speak when you are more settled. Have you any objection to my taking Merana and Annoura away for a little while? I’ve seen neither in quite some time.”

Rand gaped at her. She swooped in, insulted him, threatened him, casually announced she knew about the voice in his head, and with that she wanted to leave and talk with Merana and Annoura?
Is
she
mad?
Still no answer from Lews Therin. The man was real. He was!

“Go away,” he said. “Go away, and. . . .” He was not mad. “All of you, get out! Get out!”

Dashiva blinked at him, tilting his head, then shrugged and started for the door. Cadsuane smiled in such a way that he half-expected her to tell him again he was a good boy, then gathered up Merana and Annoura and herded them toward the Maidens, who were lowering their veils and frowning worriedly. Narishma looked at him too, hesitating until Rand gestured sharply. Finally they were all gone, and he was alone. Alone.

Convulsively he hurled the Dragon Scepter. The spearpoint stuck quivering in the back of one the chairs, the tassels swaying.

“I am not mad,” he said to the empty room. Lews Therin had told him things; he would never have escaped Galina’s chest without the dead man’s voice. But he had used the Power before he ever heard the voice; he had figured out how to call lightning and hurl fire and form a construct that had killed hundreds of Trollocs. But then, maybe that had been Lews Therin, like those memories of climbing trees in a plum orchard, and entering the Hall of the Servants, and a dozen more that crept up on him unawares. And maybe those memories were all fancies, mad dreams of a mad mind, just like the voice.

He realized he was pacing, and could not stop. He felt as if he had to move or his muscles would tear him apart in spasms. “I am not mad,” he panted. Not yet. “I am not—” The sound of the door opening made him whirl, hoping for Min.

It was Riallin again, supporting a short stocky woman in a dark blue dress, with hair more gray than not and a blunt face. A haggard, red-eyed face.

He wanted to tell them to go away, to leave him alone. Alone. Was he alone? Was Lews Therin a dream? If only they would leave him. . . . Idrien Tarsin was the head of the school he had founded here in Cairhien, a woman so practical he was not sure she believed in the One Power since she could neither see nor touch it. What could reduce her to this state?

He made himself turn toward her. Mad or not, alone or not, there was no one else to do what had to be done. Not even this small duty. Heavier than a mountain. “What is the matter?” he asked, making his voice as gentle as he could.

Suddenly weeping, Idrien stumbled to him and collapsed against his chest. When she was coherent enough to tell her story, he felt like weeping too.

Merana followed closely as she dared on Cadsuane’s heels, a hundred questions bubbling on her tongue, but Cadsuane was not a woman whose sleeve you plucked. She decided who she noticed, and when. Annoura held her silence, too, the pair of them drawn along in the other’s wake down the palace corridors, down flights of stairs, polished marble at first, then plain dark stone. Merana exchanged glances with her sister Gray, and felt a moment’s pang. She did not know the woman, really, but Annoura wore the steely look of a girl on her way to the Mistress of Novices, determined to be brave. They were not novices. They were not children. She opened her mouth—and closed it, intimidated by the gray bun bobbing ahead of her with its dangling moons and stars and birds and fish. Cadsuane was . . . Cadsuane.

Merana had met her once before, or at least listened to her and been spoken to, when she was a novice. Sisters had come from every Ajah to see the woman, filled with an awe they could not hide. Once Cadsuane Melaidhrin had been the standard by which every new entry into the novice book was judged. Until Elayne Trakand, none had come to the White Tower in her lifetime who could match that standard, much less surpass it. In more ways than one, her like had not walked among Aes Sedai for a thousand years. A refusal to accept selection as a Sitter was unheard of, yet it was said she had refused, and at least twice. It was said she
had spurned being raised head of the Green Ajah, too. It was said she once vanished from the Tower for ten years because the Hall intended to raise her Amyrlin. Not that she had ever spent a day more in Tar Valon than absolutely necessary. Word of Cadsuane came to the Tower, stories to make sisters gape, adventures to make those who dreamed of the shawl shiver. She would end a legend among Aes Sedai. If she was not already. The shawl had graced Merana’s shoulders for over twenty-five years when Cadsuane announced her retirement from the world, her hair already solid gray, and everyone assumed her long dead when the Aiel War erupted another twenty-five years on, but before the fighting was three months old, she reappeared, accompanied by two Warders, men long in the tooth yet still hard as iron. It was said Cadsuane had had more Warders over the years than most sisters had shoes. After the Aiel retreated from Tar Valon, she retired once more, but some said, more than half-seriously, that Cadsuane would never die so long as even a spark of adventure remained in the world.

And that is the sort of nonsense that novices babble
, Merana reminded herself firmly.
Even we die eventually.
Yet Cadsuane was still Cadsuane. And if she was not one of those sisters who had appeared in the city after al’Thor was taken, the sun would not set tonight. Merana moved her arms to adjust her shawl and realized it was hanging on a peg in her room. Ridiculous. She needed no reminders of who she was. If only it had been someone other than Cadsuane. . . . A pair of Wise Ones standing in the mouth of a crossing corridor watched them pass, cold pale eyes in stony faces beneath their dark head scarves. Edarra and Leyn. Both could channel, and quite strongly; they might have risen high had they gone to the Tower as girls. Cadsuane went by without seeming to notice the wilders’ disapprobation. Annoura did, frowning and muttering, slender braids swaying as she shook her head. Merana kept her own eyes on the floor tiles.

Undoubtedly it would fall to her now, explaining to Cadsuane the . . . compromise . . . that had been worked out with the Wise Ones last night, before she and the others were brought to the palace. Annoura did not know—she was no part of it—and Merana had small hope that Rafela or Verin would appear, or anyone else she might somehow foist the duty onto. It
was
a compromise, in a way, and perhaps the best that could be expected under the circumstances, yet she strongly questioned whether Cadsuane would see it so. She wished she did not have to be the one to convince her. Better to pour tea for those cursed men for a month. She wished she had
not been so free with her tongue with young al’Thor. Knowing why he had made her serve tea was no balm for being sealed off from every advantage she might have gained from it. She would rather think she had been caught in some
ta’veren
swirling of the Pattern than believe that a young man’s eyes, like polished blue-gray gems, had set her babbling from pure fright, but either way, she had handed all the advantage to him on a tray. She wished. . . .