Knife of Dreams (62 page)

It seemed the whole lot of her noble guests were out strolling, and when they offered her courtesies, she had to stop and pass at least a few words. Sergase Gilbearn, small and slim in a green riding dress, her dark hair lightly touched with white, who had brought all twenty of the armsmen in her service, and vinegary old Kelwin Janevor, wiry in his discreetly darned blue wool coat, who had brought ten, received as gracious an exchange as did lanky Barel Layden and stout Anthelle Sharplyn, though they were High Seats, if of minor Houses. All had ridden to her support with whatever they could gather, and none had turned back on learning the odds. Many looked uneasy today, though. No one said anything of it—they were all full of good wishes and hopes for a speedy coronation and how honored they were to follow her—but worry was written on their faces. Arilinde Branstrom, normally so ebullient you might think she believed her fifty armsmen could turn the tide for Elayne by themselves, was not the only woman chewing her lip, and Laerid Traehand, stocky and taciturn and usually as stolid as stone, was not the only man with a furrowed brow. Even news of Guybon and the aid he had brought caused only brief smiles, quickly swallowed in ill ease.

“Do you think they’ve heard of Arymilla’s confidence?” she asked in one of the brief intervals when she was not responding to bows and curtsies. “No, that wouldn’t be enough to upset Arilinde or Laerid.” Arymilla inside the walls with thirty thousand men likely would fail to upset that pair.

“It wouldn’t,” Birgitte agreed. She glanced around as if to see who besides the Guardswomen might hear before going on. “Maybe they’re worried over what’s been worrying me. You didn’t get lost when we got back. Or rather, you had help.”

Elayne paused to offer a few hurried words to a gray-haired couple in woolens that would have suited prosperous farmers. Brannin and Elvaine Martan’s manor house was much like a large farmhouse, sprawling and housing generations. A third of their armsmen were their sons and grandsons, nephews and great-nephews. Only those too young or too old to ride had been left behind to see to planting. She hoped the smiling pair did not feel they were getting short shrift, but she was walking on almost as soon as she stopped. “What do you mean, I had help?” she demanded.

“The palace is . . . changed.” For a moment, there was confusion in the
bond. Birgitte grimaced. “It sounds mad, I know, but it’s as if the whole thing had been built to a slightly different plan.” One of the Guardswomen ahead missed a step, caught herself. “I have a good memory. . . .” Birgitte hesitated, the bond filled with a jumble of emotions hastily pushed down. Most of her memories of past lives had vanished as surely as the winter’s snow. Nothing remained before the founding of the White Tower, and the four lives she had lived between then and the end of the Trolloc Wars were beginning to fragment. Little seemed to frighten her, yet she feared losing the rest, especially her memories of Gaidal Cain. “I don’t forget a path once I’ve followed it,” she went on, “and some of these hallways aren’t the same as they were. Some of the corridors have been . . . shifted. Others aren’t there anymore, and there are some new. Nobody is talking about it that I could find out, but I think the old people are keeping quiet because they’re afraid their wits are going, and the younger are afraid they’ll lose their positions.”

“That’s—” Elayne shut her mouth. Clearly it was not impossible. Birgitte did not suffer from sudden fancies. Naris’ reluctance to leave her apartments suddenly made sense, and perhaps Reene’s earlier puzzlement, too. She almost wished being with child really had befuddled her. But how? “Not the Forsaken,” she said firmly. “If they could do something like this, they’d have done it long since, and worse than. . . . A good day to you, too, Lord Aubrem.”

Lean and craggy and bald save for a thin white fringe, Aubrem Pensenor should have been dandling his grandchildren’s children on his knee, but his back was straight, his eyes clear. He had been among the first to reach Caemlyn, with near to a hundred men and the first news that it was Arymilla Marne marching against the city, with Naean and Elenia supporting her. He began reminiscing about riding for her mother in the Succession, until Birgitte murmured that Lady Dyelin would be waiting for her.

“Oh, in that case, don’t let me delay you, my Lady,” the old man said heartily. “Please give my regards to Lady Dyelin. She’s been so busy, I’ve not exchanged two words with her since reaching Caemlyn. My very best regards, if you will.” House Pensenor had been allied to Dyelin’s Taravin since time out of mind.

“Not the Forsaken,” Birgitte said once Aubrem was out of earshot. “But what caused it is only the first question. Will it happen again? If it does, will the changes always be benign? Or might you wake up and find yourself in a room without doors or windows? What happens if you’re sleeping in a room that disappears? If a corridor can go, so can a room. And
what if it’s more than the palace? We need to find out if all the streets still lead where they did. What if the next time, part of the city wall isn’t there anymore?”

“You
do
think dark thoughts,” Elayne said bleakly. Even with the Power in her, the possibilities were enough to give her a sour stomach.

Birgitte fingered the four golden knots on the shoulder of her white-collared red coat. “They came with these.” Strangely, the worry carried by the bond was less now that she had shared her concerns. Elayne hoped the woman did not think
she
had answers. No, that really was impossible. Birgitte knew her too well for that.

“Does this frighten you, Deni?” she asked. “I’ll admit it does me.”

“No more than needful, my Lady,” the blocky woman answered without stopping her careful scan of what lay ahead. Where the others walked with a hand on their sword hilts, her hand rested on her long cudgel. Her voice was as placid, and as matter-of-fact, as her face. “One time a big wagon man named Eldrin Hackly came near breaking my neck. Not usually a rough man, but he was drunk beyond drunk that night. I couldn’t get the angle right, and my cudgel seemed to bounce off his skull without making a dent. That frightened me more, because I knew certain sure I was about to die. This is just maybe, and any day you wake up, maybe you die.”

Any day you wake up, maybe you die. There were worse ways to look at life, Elayne supposed. Still, she shivered. She was safe, at least till her babes were born, but no one else was.

The two guards at the wide, lion-carved doors to the Map Room were experienced Guardsmen, one short and the next thing to scrawny, the other wide enough to appear squat though he was of average height. Nothing visible picked them out from any other men in the Guards, but only good swordsmen, trusted men, got this duty. The short man nodded to Deni, then straightened his back stiffly at a disapproving frown from Birgitte. Deni smiled at him shyly—Deni! shyly!—while a pair of Guardswomen went through the inevitable routine. Birgitte opened her mouth, but Elayne laid a hand on her arm, and the other woman looked at her, then shook her head, thick golden braid swaying slowly.

“It’s not good when they’re on duty, Elayne. They should be seeing to their duties, not mooning over each other.” She did not raise her voice, yet color appeared in Deni’s round cheeks, and she stopped smiling and started watching the corridor again. It was better that way, perhaps, yet still a pity.
Somebody
ought to have a little pleasure in their lives.

The Map Room was the second-largest ballroom in the palace, and
spacious, with four red-streaked marble fireplaces where small fires burned beneath the carved mantels, a domed ceiling worked with gilt and supported by widely spaced columns two spans from white marble walls that had been stripped of tapestries, and sufficient mirrored stand-lamps to light the room as well as if it had windows. The greatest part of its tile floor was a detailed mosaic map of Caemlyn, originally laid down more than a thousand years ago, after the New City had been completed though before Low Caemlyn began growing. Long before there was an Andor, before even Artur Hawkwing. It had been redone several times since, as tiles faded or became worn, so every street was exact—at least, they had been until today; the Light send they still were—and despite many buildings replaced over the years, even some of the alleys were unchanged from what the huge map showed.

There would be no dancing in the Map Room for the foreseeable future, however. Long tables between the columns held more maps, some large enough to spill over the edges, and shelves along the walls held stacks of reports, those not so sensitive they needed to be locked away or else committed to memory and burned. Birgitte’s wide writing table, nearly covered with baskets, most full of papers, stood at the far end of the room. As Captain-General, she had her own study, but as soon as she discovered the Map Room, she had decided the map in the floor made it too good not to use.

A small wooden disc, painted red, marked the spot on the outer wall where the assault had just been beaten back. Birgitte scooped it up in passing and tossed it into a round basket full of the things on her writing table. Elayne shook her head. It was a small basket, but if there were enough attacks at once to need that many markers. . . .

“My Lady Birgitte, I have that report on available fodder you asked for,” a graying woman said, holding out a page covered with neat lines. The White Lion was worked small on the breast of her neat brown dress. Five other clerks went on with their work, pens scritching. They were among Master Norry’s most trusted, and Mistress Harfor had personally screened the half dozen messengers in red-and-white livery, swift young men—boys really—who stood against the wall behind the clerks’ small writing tables. One, a pretty youth, began a bow before cutting it short with a blush. Birgitte had settled the question of courtesies, to her or other nobles, with very few words. Work came first, and any noble who disliked that could just avoid the Map Room.

“Thank you, Mistress Anford. I’ll look at it later. If you and the others will wait outside, please?”

Mistress Anford quickly gathered up the messengers and the other clerks, giving them only time to stopper their ink jars and blot their work. No one showed a glimmer of surprise. They were accustomed to the need for privacy at times. Elayne had heard people call the Map Room the Secrets Room, though nothing very secret was kept there. All of that was locked away in her apartments.

While the clerks and messengers were filing out, Elayne strode to one of the long tables where a map showed Caemlyn and its surroundings for at least fifty miles in each direction. Even the Black Tower had been inked in, a square sitting less than two leagues south of the city. A growth on Andor, and no way to be rid of it. She still sent parties of Guardsman to inspect some days, via gateways, but the place was large enough that the Asha’man could have been up to anything without her learning of it. Pins with enameled heads marked Arymilla’s eight camps around the city, and small metal figures various other camps. A falcon, finely wrought in gold and no taller than her little finger, showed where the Goshien were. Or had been. Were they gone yet? She slipped the falcon into her belt pouch. Aviendha was very much a falcon. On the other side of the table, Birgitte raised a questioning eyebrow.

“They’re gone, or going,” Elayne told her. There would be visits. Aviendha was not gone forever. “Sent somewhere by Rand. Where, I don’t know, burn him.”

“I wondered why Aviendha wasn’t with you.”

Elayne laid one finger atop a bronze horseman less than a hand tall, standing a few leagues west of the city. “Someone needs to take a look at Davram Bashere’s camp. Find out whether the Saldaeans are leaving, too. And the Legion of the Dragon.” It did not matter if they were, really. They had not interfered in matters, thank the Light, and the time when fear that they might restrained Arymilla was long past. But she disliked things happening in Andor without her knowledge. “Send Guardsmen to the Black Tower tomorrow, as well. Tell them to count how many Asha’man they see.”

“So he’s planning a big battle. Another big battle. Against the Seanchan, I suppose.” Folding her arms beneath her breasts, Birgitte frowned at the map. “I’d wonder where and when, except we have enough in front of us to be going on with.”

The map displayed the reasons Arymilla was pressing so hard. For one, to the northeast of Caemlyn, almost off the map, lay the bronze image of a sleeping bear, curled up with its paws over its nose. Two hundred thousand men, near enough, almost as many trained men as all of Andor could field.
Four Borderland rulers, accompanied by perhaps a dozen Aes Sedai they tried to keep hidden, searching for Rand, their reasons unstated. Borderlanders had no cause to turn against Rand that she could see—though the simple fact was, he had not bound them to him as he had other lands—but Aes Sedai were another matter, especially with their allegiance uncertain, and twelve approached a dangerous number even for him. Well, the four rulers had in part deciphered her motives for asking them into Andor, yet she had managed to mislead them concerning Rand’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, the Borderlanders had belied every tale of how swiftly they could move as they crept south, and now they sat in place, trying to find a way to avoid coming near a city under siege. That was understandable, even laudable. Outland armies in close proximity to Andoran armsmen, on Andoran soil, would make for a touchy situation. There were always at least a few hotheads. Bloodshed, and maybe war, could start all too easily under those circumstances. Even so, bypassing Caemlyn was going to be difficult; the narrow country roads had been turned to bogs by the rains, giving hard passage to an army that large. Elayne could have wished they had marched another twenty or thirty miles toward Caemlyn, though. She had hoped their presence would have had a different effect by now. It might still.