“Do you want me to come along, my Lord?” Gorderan asked slowly, not quite looking at the women now. He tucked his thumbs behind his belt and did not quite look at Mat, either. “Just to carry, maybe?”
Tuon did not say a word. She just stood there looking up at Mat, waiting, big eyes getting cooler by the second. The dice bounced and rattled in his head. Well, he only hesitated a heart?beat before jerking his head to send the Redarm away. Maybe two heartbeats. He had to trust his luck. Trust her word.Trust is the sound of death. He stepped on that thought hard. This was no song, and no old memory could guide him. The dice inside his skull kept spinning.
With a slight bow, he offered his arm, which Tuon examined as if she had never seen an arm before, pursing those full lips. Then she gathered her cloak and set off with Selucia gliding at her heels, leaving him to hurry after them. No, women never did make it easy.
Despite the early hour, two burly fellows with cudgels were already guarding the entrance, and a third with a clear glass pitcher to take the coins and dump them through a slot in the iron-strapped box on the ground. Each of the three looked too clumsy to palm a copper without falling on his face, but Luca took no chances. Twenty or thirty people were already waiting inside the heavy ropes that led to the big blue banner naming Lucas show, and unfortunately, Latelle was there, too, stern-faced in a dress sewn with crimson spangles and a cloak sewn with blue. Lucas wife trained bears. Mat thought the bears did their tricks for fear she might bite them.
“I have everything in hand,” he told her. “Believe me, there’s nothing to worry about.” He might as well have spared his breath.
Latelle ignored him, frowning worriedly at Tuon and Selucia. She and her husband were the only two showfolk who knew who they were. There had seemed no reason to tell either about this morning’s jaunt. Luca, at least, would have had kittens. The stare Latelle shifted to Mat was not worried, just stone hard. “Remem?ber,” she said quietly, “if you send us to the gallows, you send your?self.” Then she sniffed and went back to studying the people waiting to get in. Latelle was even better than Luca at judging the weight of a purse before the drawstrings were undone. She was also ten times tougher than her husband. The dice tumbled on. What?ever had set them spinning, he had not yet reached the fateful point. The deciding point.
“She is a good wife for Master Luca,” Tuon murmured when they had gone a little way.
Mat looked at her sideways, and resettled his hat on his head. There had been no mockery in her tone. Did she hate Lucathat much? Or was she saying what sort of wifeshe would be? Or . . . ? Burn him, he could go as crazy as Domon thought he was, trying to puzzle this woman out. She had to be the reason for the feel of dice in his head. What was she going to do?
It was a short walk away from the rising sun to the town, along a hard-packed road through hills that were treeless here, but peo?ple dotted the road the way windmills and salt pans dotted the hills. Staring straight ahead, they moved so purposefully they seemed not to see anyone in front of them. Mat dodged a round-faced man who nearly walked right into him, which made him have to jump away from a white-haired old fellow making a good speed on spindly legs. That put him in front of a plump girl who would have run up the front of him if he had not jumped again.
“Are you practicing a dance, Toy?” Tuon said, peering up at him over a slim shoulder. Her breath made a faint white mist in front of her cowl. “It isn’t very graceful.”
He opened his mouth, just to point out how crowded the road was, and suddenly he realized he could no longer see anyone beyond her and Selucia. The people who had been there were just gone, the road empty as far as he could see before it made a bend. Slowly, he turned his head. There was no one between him and the show, either, just the folk waiting in line, and that looked no longer than before. Beyond the show, the road wound into the hills toward a distant forest, empty. Not a soul in sight. He pressed fingers against his chest, feeling the foxhead medallion through his coat. Just a piece of silver on a rawhide cord. He wished it felt cold as ice. Tuon arched an eyebrow. Selucia’s stare named him fool.
“I can’t buy you a dress standing here,” he said. That was the point of this expedition, his promise to find Tuon something better than dresses that hung on her and made her look a child in a grownup’s clothing. At least, he was pretty sure he had promised that, and she was perfectly certain. The needlework of the show’s seamstresses met with Tuon’s approval, but not the cloth they had available. Performers’ costumes glittered with spangles and beads and bright colors, but the cloth was usually whatever could be found cheaply. Those who had better kept it and used it till it wore out. Jurador made its money from salt, though, and salt made a great deal of money. The town’s shops should offer any sort of material a woman could wish.
There was no finger-wiggling, this time. Tuon shared a look with Selucia. The taller woman shook her head, a wry, rueful twist to her mouth. Tuon shookher head. And they gathered their cloaks and started toward the town’s iron-studded gates. Women! He hurried to catch up again. They were his prisoners, after all. They were. Their shadows stretched out long in front of them. Had any of those people cast shadows before they vanished? He could not recall any of them breathing a mist, either. It hardly seemed to matter. They were gone, and he was not going to think about where they had come from or where they had gone. Probably something to do with beingta’veren. He was going to put it out of his head. He was. The dice rattling away left room for nothing else.
The gate guards seemed incurious about strangers, or at least about a man and two women afoot. Hard-faced fellows in white-painted breastplates and conical helmets with what looked like horsetails for crests, they ran impassive eyes over the cloaked women, lingering suspiciously a moment on Mat for some reason, and then returned to leaning on their halberds and staring blankly at the road. They were local men, most likely, in any case not Seanchan. The salt merchants and the local lady, Aethelaine, who apparently said whatever the salt merchants told her to, had sworn the Oaths of Return without hesitation and offered to pay a salt tax before they were asked. No doubt the Seanchan would get around to installing some sort of official here eventually, just to keep an eye on everything, but for the moment, they had more important uses for their soldiers. Mat had sent Thorn and Juilin both to make sure there were no Seanchan in Jurador before agreeing to this excursion. A fool could trip over his own luck if he was not careful.
It was a prosperous, busy town, Jurador, with stonepaved streets, most of them wide and all lined with stone buildings roofed in reddish tiles. Houses and inns rubbed shoulders with sta?bles and taverns, in a noisy jumble with a blacksmith’s clanging hammer on an anvil here and the racketing of a rugweaver’s looms there, and everywhere, it seemed, coopers hammering bands on tight barrels for transporting salt. Hawkers cried pins and ribbons, meat pies and roasted nuts from trays, or winter-wrinkled turnips and sorry plums from barrows. On every street men and women stood guard over the display goods on narrow tables in front of their shops and bellowed lists of what was offered within.
Picking out the salt merchants’ houses was easy, though, three stories of stone rather than two, covering eight times as much ground as any others, each with a columned walk overlooking the street and shielded by white wrought-iron screens between the columns. The lower windows on most houses had those screens, though not always painted. That much was reminiscent of Ebou Dar, but little else was, beyond the olive complexions of the peo?ple. There were no deep necklines exposing cleavage here, no skirts sewn upto display colored petticoats. The women wore embroidered dresses with high necks right up to their chins, a lit?tle embroidery for the common folk, a great deal for the richer, who wore cloaks embroidered top to bottom and sheer veils hang?ing over their faces from combs of gold-work or carved ivory stuck into dark, coiled braids. The men’s short coats were worked almost as thickly, in colors just as bright, and rich or poor, most men wore a long belt knife with a blade a little less curved than those in Ebou Dar. Rich or poor, the fellows did have a tendency to fondle their knife hilts as if expecting a fight, so maybe that was the same.
The Lady Aethelaine’s palace appeared no different from the outside than the salt merchants’ mansions, but it was located on the town’s main square, a wide expanse of polished stone where a broad round marble fountain sprayed water into the air. People filled their buckets and big pottery water jars from pipes spilling into stone basins at the corners of other squares, though. The big fountain put out a smell of brine. It was a symbol of Jurador’s wealth, pumped from the same source as the salt wells in the sur?rounding hills. Mat got to see a good deal of the town before the sun climbed even halfway to itsnoonpeak.
Every time Tuon and Selucia spotted a shop with silks dis?played out front, they stopped at the long narrow table to feel bolts of cloth and whisper with their heads together, waving off the attentions of the watchful shopkeeper. Those kept avery watchful eye, until they realized Mat was with the two women. In their stout woolens, well worn and badly fitting, they did not look customers for silk. Mat, with one side of his cloak thrown back to expose the lining, did. Whenever he tried to show an interest, though - women said they wanted you to show an interest! - whenever he got close enough to hear what they were saying, the women fell silent and looked at him, cool dark eyes and cool blue staring out of their deep cowls, until he fell back a step or two. Then Selucia would bend her head to Tuon’s, and they would go back to murmuring and fingering silk, red silk, blue silk, green silk, smooth shimmering silk and brocaded silk. Jurador was a very wealthy town. Luckily, he had tucked a fat purse of gold into his coat pocket. None of it s
