Knife of Dreams (55 page)

“ ‘I,’ ” Kara said. “Remember what I told you? I call you Jillari, but you call yourself ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Try it. And look at me. You can do it.” She sounded as though she were encouraging a child.

The Seanchan woman wet her lips, giving Kara a sidelong look. “I,” she said softly. And promptly began weeping, tears rolling down her cheeks faster than she could wipe them away with her fingers. Kara enveloped her in a hug and made soothing noises. She seemed about to cry, too. Aviendha shifted uncomfortably. It was not the tears—men or women, Aiel wept
unashamed when they felt the need—but for them, touching hands was a great display in public.

“Why don’t you two walk on alone for a while,” Reanne told the pair with a comforting smile that deepened the fine lines at the corners of her blue eyes. Her voice was high and lovely, suitable for singing. “I’ll catch you up, and we can eat together.” They offered her curtsies, too, Jillari still weeping, and turned away with Kara’s arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders. “If you care to, my Lady,” Reanne said before they had gone two steps, “we could talk on the way to your apartments.”

The woman’s face was calm, and her tone put no special freight on the words, yet Elayne’s jaw tightened. She forced it to relax. There was no point in being stubborn stupid. She
was
wet. And beginning to shiver, though the day could hardly be called cold. “An excellent suggestion,” she said, gathering her sodden gray skirts. “Come.”

“We could walk a little faster,” Birgitte muttered, not quite far enough under her breath.

“We could run,” Aviendha said, without trying to keep her voice low at all. “We might get dry from the exertion.”

Elayne ignored them and glided at a suitable pace. In her mother, it would have been called regal. She was not sure she managed that, but she was not about to run through the palace. Or even hurry. The sight of her rushing would start a dozen rumors if not a hundred, each one of some dire event worse than the one before. Too many rumors floated on every breath of air as it was. The worst was that the city was about to fall, that she planned to flee before it did. No, she would be seen to be utterly unruffled. Everyone had to believe her completely confident. Even if that was a false facade. Anything else, and she might as well yield to Arymilla. Fear of defeat had lost as many battles as weakness had, and she could not afford to lose a single one. “I thought the Captain-General had you out scouting, Reanne.”

Birgitte had been using two of the Kin for scouts, women who could not make a gateway large enough to admit a horse cart, but with circles of Kinswomen available to make gateways, for trade as well as moving soldiers, she had co-opted the remaining six who could Travel on their own. An encircling army was no impediment to them. Yet Reanne’s well-cut, fine blue wool, though unadorned save for a red-enameled circle pin on the high neck, was decidedly unsuited for skulking about the countryside.

“The Captain-General believes her scouts need rest. Unlike herself,” Reanne added blandly, raising an eyebrow at Birgitte. The bond carried a
brief flash of annoyance. Aviendha laughed for some reason; Elayne still did not understand Aiel humor. “Tomorrow, I go out again. It takes me back to the days long ago when I was a pack-peddler with one mule.” The Kin all followed many crafts during their long lives, always changing location and craft before anyone took note of how slowly they aged. The oldest among them had mastered half a dozen crafts or more, shifting from one to another easily. “I decided to use my freeday helping Jillari settle on a surname.” Reanne grimaced. “It’s custom in Seanchan to strike a girl’s name from her family’s rolls when she’s collared, and the poor woman feels she has no right to the name she was born with. Jillari was given with the collar, but she wants to keep that.”

“There are more reasons to hate the Seanchan than I can count,” Elayne said heatedly. Then, belatedly, she caught up to the import of it all. Learning to curtsy. Choosing a new surname. Burn her, if pregnancy was making her slow-witted on top of everything else . . . ! “When did Jillari change her mind about the collar?” There was no reason to let everyone know she was being dense today.

The other woman’s expression did not alter a whit, but she hesitated just long enough to let Elayne know her deception had failed. “Just this morning, after you and the Captain-General left, or you’d have been informed.” Reanne hurried on so the point had no time to fester. “And there’s other news as good. At least, it’s somewhat good. One of the
sul’dam
, Marli Noichin—you recall her?—has admitted seeing the weaves.”

“Oh, that
is
good news,” Elayne murmured. “Very good. Twenty-eight more to go, but they might be easier now that one of them has broken.” She had watched an attempt to convince Marli that she could learn to channel, that she could already see weaves of the Power. The plump Seanchan woman had been stubbornly defiant even after she began crying.

“Somewhat good, I said.” Reanne sighed. “In Marli’s opinion, she might as well have admitted she kills children. Now she insists that she must be collared. She
begs
for the
a’dam
. It makes my skin creep. I don’t know what to do with her.”

“Send her back to the Seanchan as soon as we can,” Elayne replied.

Reanne stopped dead in shock, her eyebrows climbing. Birgitte cleared her throat loudly—impatience filled the bond before being stifled—and the Kinswoman gave a start, then began walking again, at a faster pace than before. “But they’ll make her a
damane
. I can’t condemn any woman to that.”

Elayne gave her Warder a look that slid off like a dagger sliding off
good armor. Birgitte’s expression was . . . bland. To the golden-haired woman, being a Warder contained strong elements of older sister. And worse, sometimes mother.

“
I
can,” she said emphatically, lengthening her own stride. Well, it would not hurt to get dry a little sooner rather than later. “She helped hold enough others prisoner that she deserves a taste of it herself, Reanne. But that’s not why I mean to send her back. If any of the others wants to stay and learn, and make up for what she’s done, I certainly won’t hand her to the Seanchan, but Light’s truth, I hope they all feel like Marli. They’ll put an
a’dam
on her, Reanne, but they won’t be able to keep secret who she was. Every one-time
sul’dam
I can send the Seanchan to collar will be a mattock digging at their roots.”

“A harsh decision,” Reanne said sadly. She plucked at her skirts in an agitated manner, smoothed them, then plucked at them again. “Perhaps you might consider thinking on it for a few days? Surely it isn’t anything that has to be done immediately.”

Elayne gritted her teeth. The woman had as much as implied that she had reached this decision in one of her swinging moods! But had she? It seemed reasonable and logical. They could not keep the
sul’dam
imprisoned forever. Sending those who did not
want
to be free back to the Seanchan was a way to be rid of them and strike a blow at the Seanchan at the same time. It
was
more than hatred of any Seanchan. Of course, it was. Burn her, but she bloody well hated being unsure whether her own decisions were sound! She could not afford to make unsound decisions. Still, there was no hurry. Better to send back a group, if possible, in any event. There was less chance of someone arranging an “accident,” that way. She did not put that sort of thing past the Seanchan. “I will think on it, Reanne, but I doubt I’ll change my mind.”

Reanne sighed again, deeply. Eager for her promised return to the White Tower and novice white—she had been heard to say she envied Kirstian and Zarya—she wanted very much to enter the Green Ajah, but Elayne had her doubts. Reanne was kindhearted, softhearted in fact, and Elayne had never met any Green who could be called soft. Even those who seemed frilly or frail on the surface were cold steel inside.

Ahead of them, Vandene glided from a crossing corridor, slender, white-haired and graceful in dark gray wool with deep brown trim, and turned in the same direction they were going, apparently without noticing them. She was Green, and as hard as a hammerhead. Jaem, her Warder, walked beside her, head bent in close conversation, now and then raking a
hand through his thinning gray hair. Gnarled and lean, his dark green coat hanging loose on him, he was old, but every scrap as hard as she, an old root that could dull axes. Kirstian and Zarya, both in plain novice white, followed meekly with their hands folded at their waists, the one pale as a Cairhienin, the other short and slim-hipped. For runaways who had succeeded in what so few did, remaining free of the White Tower for years, over three hundred years in Kirstian’s case, they had resettled into their places as novices with remarkable ease. But then, the Kin’s Rule was a blending of the rules that governed novices and those that Accepted lived by. Perhaps, to them, the white woolen dresses and the loss of freedom to come and go as they chose were the only real change, though the Kin regulated that last to some extent.

“I’m very glad she has those two to occupy her,” Reanne murmured in tones of sympathy. Pained caring shone in her eyes. “It’s good that she mourns her sister, but I fear she’d be obsessed with Adeleas’ death without Kirstian and Zarya. She may be anyway. I believe that dress she’s wearing belonged to Adeleas. I’ve tried offering solace—I have experience helping people overcome grief; I’ve been a village Wise Woman as well as wearing the red belt in Ebou Dar many years ago—but she won’t give me two words.”

In fact, Vandene wore
only
her dead sister’s clothing, now, and Adeleas’ flowery perfume, as well. At times, Elayne thought Vandene was trying to become Adeleas, to offer up herself in order to bring her sister back to life. But could you fault someone for being obsessed with finding who had murdered her sister? Not that more than a handful of people knew that was what she was doing. Everyone else believed as Reanne did, that she was absorbed with teaching Kirstian and Zarya, that and beginning their punishment for running away. Vandene was doing both, of course, and with a will, yet it was really just a cover for her true purpose.

Elayne reached out without looking, and found Aviendha’s hand waiting to take hers, a comforting grip. She squeezed back, unable to imagine the grief of losing Aviendha. They shared a quick glance, and Aviendha’s eyes mirrored her own feelings. Had she really once thought Aiel faces impassive and unreadable?

“As you say, Reanne, she has Kirstian and Zarya to occupy her.” Reanne was not among the handful who knew the truth. “We all mourn in our own way. Vandene will find solace along her own path.”

When she found Adeleas’ murderer, it was to be hoped. If that failed to at least begin assuaging the pain. . . . Well, that was to be faced when it
must be. For now, she must allow Vandene her head. Especially since she had no doubt the Green would ignore any attempt to rein her in. That was more than irritating; it was infuriating. She had to watch Vandene perhaps destroying herself, and worse, make use of it. Having no alternative made that no less unpalatable.

As Vandene and her companions turned aside down another hallway, Reene Harfor appeared out of a side corridor right in front of Elayne, a stout, quiet woman with a graying bun atop her head and an air of regal dignity, her formal scarlet tabard with the White Lion of Andor as always looking freshly ironed. Elayne had never seen her with a hair out of place or looking even slightly the worse for a long day spent overseeing the workings of the palace. And more besides. Her round face appeared puzzled for some reason, but it took on a look of concern at the sight of Elayne. “Why, my Lady, you’re drenched,” she said, sounding shocked, as she made her curtsy. “You need to get out of those wet things right away.”

“Thank you, Mistress Harfor,” Elayne said through her teeth. “I hadn’t noticed.”

She regretted the outburst instantly—the First Maid had been as faithful to her as to her mother—but what made matters worse was that Mistress Harfor took her flare-up in stride, never so much as blinking. Elayne Trakand’s moods were no longer anything to be surprised at.

“I will walk with you if I may, my Lady,” she said calmly, falling in at Elayne’s side. A freckled young serving woman carrying a basket of folded bed linens began to offer her courtesies, only a hair more directed at Elayne than the First Maid, but Reene made a quick gesture that sent the girl scurrying before she completed bending her knees. Perhaps it was just to keep her from overhearing. Reene did not stop talking. “Three of the mercenary captains are demanding to meet with you. I put them in the Blue Reception Room, and told the servants to keep watch so no small valuables accidentally fall into their pockets. Not that I had to, as it turned out. Careane Sedai and Sareitha Sedai appeared soon after and settled in to keep the captains company. Captain Mellar is with them, too.”

Elayne frowned. Mellar. She was trying to keep him too busy for mischief, yet he had a way of turning up where and when she least wanted him. For that matter, so did Careane and Sareitha. One of them had to be the Black Ajah killer. Unless it was Merilille, and she was beyond reach, it seemed. Reene knew about that. Keeping her in the dark would have been criminal. She had eyes everywhere, and they might notice a vital clue. “What do the mercenaries want, Mistress Harfor?”

“More money, is my guess,” Birgitte growled, and swung her unstrung bow like a club.

“Most likely,” Reene agreed, “but they refused to tell me.” Her mouth tightened slightly. No more than that, yet it seemed these mercenaries had managed to offend her. If they were stupid enough not to see that she was more than a superior serving woman, then they were very dense indeed.