The Dragon Reborn (47 page)

Egwene stared at the sparkling sword. If the Prophecies of the Dragon were true, if Rand was the Dragon as Moiraine claimed, he would wield it one day, though from the rest of what she knew of the Prophecies concerning
Callandor
, she could not see how it could ever come to be.
But if there’s a way to take it, maybe the Black Ajah knows how. If they know it, I can figure it out
.

Cautiously, she reached out with the Power, probing at whatever held and shielded the sword. Her probe touched—something—and stopped. She could sense which of the Five Powers had been used here. Air, and Fire, and Spirit. She could trace the intricate weave made by
saidar
, set with a strength that amazed her. There were gaps in that weave, spaces where her probe should slide through. When she tried, it was like fighting the strongest part of the weave head on. It hit her then, what she was trying to force a way through, and she let her probe vanish. Half that wall had been woven using
saidar
; the other half, the part she could not sense or touch, had been made with
saidin
. That was not it, exactly—the wall was all of one piece—but it was close enough.
A stone wall stops a blind woman as surely as one who can see it
.

Footsteps echoed in the distance. Boots.

Egwene could not tell how many there were, or from which direction
they were coming, but Silvie gave a start and immediately stared off among the columns. “He’s coming to stare at it again,” she muttered. “Awake or asleep, he wants. . . .” She seemed to remember Egwene, and put on a worried smile. “You must leave, now, my Lady. He mustn’t find you here, or even know you’ve been.”

Egwene was already backing in among the columns, and Silvie followed, flapping her hands and waving her stick. “I am going, Silvie. I just have to remember the way.” She fingered the stone ring. “Take me back to the hills.” Nothing happened. She channeled a hairlike flow to the ring. “Take me back to the hills.” The redstone columns still surrounded her. The boots were closer, close enough not to be swallowed in their own echoes anymore.

“You don’t know the way out,” Sylvie said flatly, then went on in a near whisper, ingratiating and mocking at once, an old retainer who felt she could take liberties. “Oh, my Lady, this is a dangerous place to come into, if you don’t know the way out. Come, let poor old Silvie take you out. Poor old Silvie will tuck you safe in your bed, my Lady.” She wrapped both arms around Egwene, urging her further from the sword. Not that Egwene needed much urging. The boots had stopped; he—whoever he was—was probably gazing at
Callandor
.

“Just show me the way,” Egwene whispered back. “Or tell me. There’s no need to push.” The old woman’s fingers had somehow gotten tangled around the stone ring. “Don’t touch that, Silvie.”

“Safe in your bed.”

Pain annihilated the world.

With a throat-wrenching shriek, Egwene sat up in the dark, sweat rolling down her face. For a moment she had no idea where she was, and did not care. “Oh, Light,” she moaned, “that hurt. Oh, Light, that hurt!” She ran her hands over herself, sure her skin must be scored or wealed to make such a burning, but she could not find a mark.

“We are here,” Nynaeve’s voice said from the darkness. “We’re here, Egwene.”

Egwene threw herself toward the voice and wrapped her arms around Nynaeve’s neck in sheer relief. “Oh, Light, I’m back. Light, I’m back.”

“Elayne,” Nynaeve said.

In a few moments one of the candles was giving a small light. Elayne paused with the candle in hand and the spill she had lit with flint and steel
in the other. Then she smiled, and every candle in the room burst into flame. She stopped at the washstand and came back to the bed with a cool, damp cloth to wash Egwene’s face.

“Was it bad?” she asked worriedly. “You never stirred. You never mumbled. We did not know whether to wake you or not.”

Hurriedly, Egwene fumbled the leather cord from around her neck and hurled it and the stone ring across the room. “Next time,” she panted, “we decide on a time, and you wake me after it. Wake me if you have to stick my head in a basin of water!” She had not realized that she had decided there would be a next time.
Would you put your head in a bear’s mouth just to show you weren’t afraid? Would you do it twice just because you’d done it once and didn’t die?

Yet it was more than a matter of proving to herself that she was not afraid. She was afraid, and knew it. But so long as the Black Ajah had those
ter’angreal
Corianin had studied, she would have to keep going back. She was sure the answer to why they wanted them lay in
Tel’aran’rhiod
. If she could find answers about the Black Ajah there—perhaps other answers, too, if half what she had been told about Dreaming were true—she had to go back. “But not tonight,” she said softly. “Not yet.”

“What happened?” Nynaeve asked. “What did you . . . dream?”

Egwene lay back on the bed and told them. Of it all, the only thing she left out was about Perrin talking to the wolf. She left the wolf out altogether. She felt a little guilty about keeping secrets from Elayne and Nynaeve, but it was Perrin’s secret to tell, when and if he chose, not hers. The rest she gave them word for word, describing everything. When she was done, she felt emptied.

“Aside from being tired,” Elayne said, “did he look hurt? Egwene, I cannot believe he would ever hurt you. I cannot believe he would.”

“Rand,” Nynaeve said dryly, “will have to look after himself awhile longer.” Elayne blushed; she looked pretty doing it. Egwene realized that Elayne looked pretty doing anything, even crying, or scrubbing pots.
“Callandor,”
Nynaeve continued. “The Heart of the Stone. That was marked on the plan. I think we know where the Black Ajah is.”

Elayne had regained her poise. “It does not change the trap,” she said. “If it is not a diversion, it is a trap.”

Nynaeve smiled grimly. “The best way to catch whoever set a trap is to spring it and wait for him to come. Or her, in this instance.”

“You mean go to Tear?” Egwene said, and Nynaeve nodded.

“The Amyrlin has cut us loose, it seems. We make our own decisions,
remember? At least we know the Black Ajah is in Tear, and we know who to look for there. Here, all we can do is sit and stew in our own suspicions of everybody, wonder if there is another Gray Man out there. I would rather be the hound than the rabbit.”

“I have to write to my mother,” Elayne said. When she saw the looks they gave her, her voice became defensive. “I have already vanished once without her knowing where I was. If I do it again. . . . You do not know Mother’s temper. She could send Gareth Bryne and the whole army against Tar Valon. Or hunting after us.”

“You could stay here,” Egwene said.

“No. I will not let you two go alone. And I won’t stay here wondering if the sister teaching me is a Darkfriend, or if the next Gray Man will come after me.” She gave a small laugh. “I will not work in the kitchens while you two are off adventuring, either. I just have to tell my mother than I am out of the Tower on the Amyrlin’s orders, so she won’t become furious if she hears rumors. I do not have to tell her where we are going, or why.”

“You surely had better not,” Nynaeve said. “She very likely would come after you if she knew about the Black Ajah. For that matter, you can’t know how many hands your letter will pass through before it reaches her, or what eyes might read it. Best not to say anything you don’t mind anyone knowing.”

“That’s another thing.” Elayne sighed. “The Amyrlin does not know I am one of you. I have to find some way to send it with no chance of her seeing it.”

“I will have to think on that.” Nynaeve’s brows furrowed. “Perhaps once we’re on our way. You could leave it at Aringill on the way downriver, if we have time to find someone there going to Caemlyn. A sight of one of those papers the Amyrlin gave us might convince somebody. We will have to hope they work on ship captains, too, unless one of you has more coin than I have.” Elayne shook her head dolefully.

Egwene did not even bother. What money they had possessed had all gone on the journey from Toman Head, except for a few coppers each. “When. . . .” She had to stop and clear her throat. “When do we leave? Tonight?”

Nynaeve looked as if she were considering it for a moment, but then she shook her head. “You need sleep, after. . . .” Her gesture took in the stone ring lying where it had bounced off the wall. “We will give the Amyrlin one more chance to seek us out. When we finish with breakfast, you both pack what you want to take, but keep it light. We have to leave
the Tower without anyone noticing, remember. If the Amyrlin doesn’t reach us by midday, I mean to be on a trading ship, shoving that paper down the captain’s throat if need be, before Prime sounds. How does that sound to you two?”

“It sounds excellent,” Elayne said firmly, and Egwene said, “Tonight or tomorrow, the sooner the better, as far as I can see.” She wished she sounded as confident as Elayne.

“Then we had best get some sleep.”

“Nynaeve,” Egwene said in a small voice, “I. . . . I don’t want to be alone tonight.” It pained her to make that admission.

“I don’t, either,” Elayne said. “I keep thinking about the Soulless. I do not know why, but they frighten me even more than the Black Ajah.”

“I suppose,” Nynaeve said slowly, “I don’t really want to be alone, myself.” She eyed the bed where Egwene lay. “That looks big enough for three, if everybody keeps her elbows to herself.”

Later, when they were shifting about trying to find a way to lie that did not feel so crowded, Nynaeve suddenly laughed.

“What is it?” Egwene asked. “You are not that ticklish.”

“I just thought of someone who’d be happy to carry Elayne’s letter for her. Happy to leave Tar Valon, too. In fact, I’d bet on it.”

Clad only in his breeches, Mat was just finishing a snack after breakfast—some ham, three apples, bread, and butter—when the door of his room opened, and Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne filed in, all smiling at him brightly. He got up for a shirt, then stubbornly sat down again. They could at least have knocked. In any case, it was good to see their faces. At first, it was.

“Well, you do look better,” Egwene said.

“As if you had had a month of good food and rest,” Elayne said.

Nynaeve pressed a hand to his forehead. He flinched before he recalled that she had done much the same for at least five years, back home.
She was just the Wisdom then
, he thought.
She wasn’t wearing that ring
.

She had noticed his flinch. She gave him a tight smile. “You look ready to be up and about, to me. Are you tired of being cooped up, yet? You never could stand two days in a row indoors.”

He eyed the last apple core reluctantly, then dropped it back on the plate. Almost, he started to lick the juice off his fingers, but they were all three looking at him. And still smiling. He realized he was trying to decide which of them was prettiest, and could not. Had they been anybody but who—and what—they were, he would have asked any and all of them to dance a jig or a reel. He had danced with Egwene often enough, back home, and even once with Nynaeve, but that seemed a long time ago.

“ ‘One pretty woman means fun at the dance. Two pretty women mean trouble in the house. Three pretty women mean run for the hills.’ ” He gave Nynaeve an even tighter smile than her own. “My da used to say that. You’re up to something, Nynaeve. You are all smiling like cats staring at a finch caught in a thornbush, and I think I am the finch.”

The smiles flickered and vanished. He noticed their hands and wondered why they all looked as if they had been washing dishes. The Daughter-Heir of Andor surely never washed a dish, and he had as hard a time imagining Nynaeve at it, even knowing she had done her own back in Emond’s Field. They all three wore Great Serpent rings, now. That was new. And not a particularly pleasant surprise.
Light, it had to happen sometime. It’s none of my business, and that is all there is to it. None of my business. It just isn’t
.