Knife of Dreams (105 page)

“We’ll need those to make our way through the Shaido camp,” Faile said gently. “Galina may not be taking us out, but I intend leaving today.” Dairaine made that imperative. Bain and Chiad could not keep her hidden long. “Or as soon we can dig out, anyway. We’ll pretend we’ve been sent to pick berries.” She did not want to step on her liege-woman’s bold gesture, though. “However, we don’t need to wear them now.” Removing her belt and collar, she righted her basket and set them atop the dirty
gai’shain
robes. The others emulated her. Alliandre retrieved her own belt and collar with a rueful laugh. At least she could laugh again. Faile wished she could.

The jumble of charred timbers and half-burned boards filling the staircase resembled one of those blacksmith’s puzzles her Perrin enjoyed. Almost everything seemed to be propping up something else. Worse, the heavier timbers might be beyond all of them working together. But if they could clear enough for them to be able to crawl through, writhing between the thick beams. . . . It would be dangerous, that crawl. But when a dangerous path was your only route to safety, you had to take it.

A few boards came away easily and were piled at the back of the basement, but after that everything had to be chosen with care, examined to see whether anything would fall if it were removed, hands feeling back as far as they could go into the tangle, groping for nails that might have
caught, trying not to think about the whole pile shifting and trapping an arm, crushing it. Only then could they begin pulling, sometimes two of them together, tugging harder and harder until the piece suddenly gave. That work went slowly, with the great pile occasionally groaning, or shifting slightly. Everyone darted back, holding their breath, when that happened. Nobody moved again until they were sure the snarl of timbers was not going to collapse. The work became the focus of their world. Once, Faile thought she heard wolves howling. Wolves generally made her think of Perrin, but not this time. The work was all.

Then Alliandre wrenched a charred board free, and with a great groan, the mass began to shift. Toward them. Everyone ran toward the back of the basement as the pile fell in with a deafening rumble, sending up more billows of dust.

When they stopped coughing and could see again, dimly, with dust still hanging in the air, perhaps a quarter of the basement was filled. All of their work undone, and worse, the jumble was leaning toward them precariously. Groaning, it sagged a little more toward them and stopped. Everything about it said the first board pulled free would bring the whole mass down on their heads. Arrela began to cry softly. Tantalizing gaps admitted sunlight and allowed them to see the street, the sky, but nothing anyone could wriggle through, even Lacile. Faile could see the red scarf Galina had used to mark the building. It fluttered for a moment in the breeze.

Staring at the scarf, she seized Maighdin’s shoulder. “I want you to try to make that scarf do something the wind wouldn’t make it do.”

“You want to attract attention?” Alliandre said hoarsely. “It’s far more likely to be Shaido than anyone else.”

“Better that than dying down here of thirst,” Faile replied, her voice harsher than she wanted. She would never see Perrin again, then. If Sevanna had her chained, she would at least be alive for him to rescue. He would rescue her; she knew it. Her duty now was to keep the women who followed her alive. And if that meant captivity, so be it. “Maighdin?”

“I might spend all day trying to embrace the Source and never succeed,” the sun-haired woman said in dull tones. She stood slumped, staring at nothing. Her face suggested that she saw an abyss beneath her feet. “And if I do embrace it, I can almost never weave anything.”

Faile loosened her grip on Maighdin and smoothed her hair instead. “I know it’s difficult,” she said soothingly. “Well, in truth, I don’t know. I’ve never done it. But you have. And you can do it again. Our lives depend on you, Maighdin. I know the strength that’s in you. I’ve seen it time and
again. There is no surrender in you. I know you can do it, and so do you.”

Slowly, Maighdin’s back straightened, and despair slid off her face. She might still see the abyss, but if she fell, she would fall without flinching. “I’ll try,” she said.

For a long while she stared up at the scarf, then shook her head dejectedly. “The Source is there, like the sun just beyond the edge of sight,” she whispered, “but every time I try to embrace it, it’s like trying to catch smoke with my fingers.”

Faile hastily pulled the
gai’shain
robes from her basket and another, careless of the gold belts and collars falling to the stone floor. “Sit down,” she said, arranging the robes in a pile. “Make yourself comfortable. I know you can do it, Maighdin.” Pressing the other woman down, she folded her legs and sat beside her.

“You can do it,” Alliandre said softly, sitting down on Maighdin’s other side.

“Yes, you can,” Lacile whispered, joining them.

“I know you can,” Arrela said as she lowered herself to the floor.

Time passed, with Maighdin staring at the scarf. Faile whispered encouragement and held on to hope hard. Suddenly the scarf went rigid, as if something had pulled it taut. A wondrous smile appeared on Maighdin’s face as the scarf began to swing back and forth like a pendulum. Six, seven, eight times it swung. Then it fluttered in the breeze and fell limp.

“That was marvelous,” Faile said.

“Marvelous,” Alliandre said. “You’re going to save us, Maighdin.”

“Yes,” Arrela murmured, “you’re going to save us, Maighdin.”

There were many kinds of battle. Sitting on the floor, whispering encouragement, Maighdin fighting to find what she could seldom find, they fought for their lives while the scarf swung, then fell to the breeze, swung and fell limp. But they fought on.

Galina kept her head down and tried not to hurry as she made her way out of Malden, past the streams of white-clad men and women carrying empty buckets into the town and full buckets back out. She did not want to attract attention, not without that cursed belt and necklace. She had donned the things when she dressed in the night, while Therava was still asleep, but it had been such a pleasure to remove them and hide them with the clothes and other things she had secreted away for her escape that she could not resist. Besides, Therava would have been angered to wake and find her
missing. She would have ordered a watch for her “little Lina,” and everyone marked her by those jewels. Well, they would pay to help her return to the Tower, now, return to her rightful place. That arrogant Faile and the other fools were dead or as good as, and she was free. She stroked the rod, hidden in her sleeve, and shivered with delight. Free!

She did hate leaving Therava alive, but if anyone had entered the woman’s tent and found her with a knife through her heart, Galina would have been the first suspect. Besides. . . . Images rose in her head, of her bending stealthily over the sleeping Therava, the woman’s own belt knife in hand, of Therava’s eyes snapping open, meeting hers in the darkness, of her screaming, of her hand opening nervelessly to drop the knife, of her begging, of Therava. . . . No. No! It would not have been that way. Certainly not! She had left Therava alive of necessity, not because she was. . . . Not for any other reason.

Suddenly wolves howled, wolves in every direction, a dozen or more. Her feet stopped of their own accord. A motley collection of tents surrounded her, walled tents, peaked tents, low Aiel tents. She had walked right through the
gai’shain
portion of the camp without realizing it. Her eyes rose to the ridge west of Malden, and she flinched. Thick fog curled along the whole length of it, concealing the trees as far as she could see in either direction. The town walls hid the ridge to the east, yet she was sure there would be thick fog there, too. The man had come! The Great Lord preserve her, she had been just in time. Well, he would not find his fool wife even if he managed to survive whatever he was about to try, nor would he find Galina Casban.

Thanking the Great Lord that Therava had not forbidden her to ride—the woman had much preferred dangling the possibility that she might be allowed, if she groveled sufficiently—Galina hurried toward her hidden stores. Let the fools who wanted to die here, die. She was free. Free!

Perrin stood just below the ridgetop, near the edge of the fog, and studied the encampment and stone-walled town below. Two hundred paces of fairly steep slope sparsely dotted with low brush down to level ground, perhaps seven hundred more of cleared ground to the first tents, then better than a mile to the town. It seemed so close, now. He did not use his looking glass. A glint off the lens from the sun just peeking over the horizon, a fingernail edge of golden-red, might ruin everything. The grayness around him curled but did not really move with the breeze, even when it gusted and made his cloak stir. The dense mist on the far ridge, obscuring the windmill there, seemed too still as well, if you studied it a while. How long before someone among those tents noticed? There was nothing to be done for it. The fog felt like any fog, damp and a little cool, but somehow Neald had fixed these mists in place before he went off to his other tasks. The sun would not burn them off even at noonday, or so the Asha’man claimed. Everything would be done by noon, one way or another, but Perrin hoped the man was right. The sky was clear, and the day looked to be warm for early spring.

Only a few Shaido seemed to be outside in the camp, relatively speaking, but thousands of white-clad figures bustled about among the tents. Tens of thousands. His eyes ached to find Faile among them, his heart ached to see her, but he could as well try to pick out one particular pin
from a barley-basket of them spilled on the ground. Instead, he stared at the town’s gates, standing wide open as they had every time he had gazed on them. Invitingly wide. They called to him. Soon, Faile and her companions would know it was time to head for those gates, and the towered fortress that bulked at the north end of the town. She might be at chores, if the Maidens were right about how the prisoners would be treated as
gai’shain
, but she would know to slip away and go to the fortress. She and her friends, and likely Alyse as well. Whatever her scheme with the Shaido, the Aes Sedai would not want to remain on a battleground. A second sister in the fortress might come in handy. The Light send it did not come to that.

He had planned with care for every eventuality he could imagine down to outright disaster, yet this was no blacksmith’s puzzle however much he wished it were. The twisted iron pieces of a blacksmith’s puzzle moved only in certain ways. Move them in the right way, and the puzzle came apart. People could move in a thousand ways, sometimes in directions you never believed possible till it happened. Would his plans stand up when the Shaido did something unexpected? They would do it, almost certainly, and all he could do in return was hope it would not lead to that disaster. With a last, longing look at Malden’s gates, he turned and walked back up the ridge.

Inside the fog, even he could not see ten paces, but he soon found Dannil Lewin among the trees on the ridgetop. Lean to the point of skinny, with a pickaxe for a nose and thick mustaches in the Taraboner style, Dannil stood out even when you could not see his face clearly. Other Two Rivers men were shapes beyond him, growing dimmer and dimmer with distance. Most were squatting or sitting on the ground, resting while they had the chance. Jori Congar was trying to entice some of the others into a game of dice, but he was quiet about it, so Perrin let it pass. No one was accepting the offer anyway. Jori was uncommon lucky with his dice.

Dannil made a leg when he saw Perrin and murmured, “My Lord.” The man had been spending too much time with Faile’s people. He called it acquiring polish, whatever that was supposed to mean. A man was not a piece of brass.